Rapid blogging from the next room as Abby tries to put Roby to sleep, I don’t think she’ll have much success. But Abby’s got to go have a chat with the other ladies on the women’s retreat, so I’ll be walking about with a sleepy Roby in a carrier, and maybe she’ll fall asleep in an hour or so, if we’re lucky.

She’s a real singer in church. At the quiet parts especially. It can make me feel bad, that we’re distracting or ruining the experience of other people. This of course cuts against the fact that people go far out of their way to endlessly remind us that it’s not only fine, but really quite good. They prefer to hear the songs of life that a young child brings, it reminds them that the church is vibrant and will continue.

During Midens, the morning prayer, she got pretty rambunctious and I decided to take her out early. Today at Vespers, the evening prayer, one of the monks approached me and said that if I wanted a quiet place when she got rambunctious that we could use a side room he showed us. One of our fellow parishioners thought that that was a polite way to ask us to take her away when she was loud.

He saw that I left when she got loud, I think it was an attempt at the opposite, to get us to stay when she gets louder than I, not the church, and comfortable with.

This is a suspicion that was confirmed when that same brother came out asking Roby and I to come back in to be blessed with holy oil. He really wanted us to be there, they all did.

This monastery really is a special place, a fact made more clear from a second visit. A bunch of people who have centered their lives around God, continuing to live, continuing to be curious, continuing to love. They may not do it in the strictest most ascetic, toughest way, but they do it, and they do it with love and grace. I’ll have to wrap my head around the spectrum of seriousness and doctrine, but…maybe later.