Made for Relationship

Monastic Family Weekend 2025

Fr. Paul Sheller and his father take on his brother and nephew in a game of Spikeball.

Recently, the monks hosted our families for our Monastic Family Weekend—a time to reconnect with our loved ones through a weekend of prayer and leisure. And how fitting that the weekend ended with the celebration of the Most Holy Trinity. Why? Because of relationship.

From all eternity, God exists in a relationship we call the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Out of this relationship came all creation, including each of us. However, when our relationship with God was fractured due to sin, it was the love of God and his immense desire for us that caused Him to send his only begotten Son for our redemption. But it did not end there. God is constantly seeking a relationship with us. He has hooked us with “an unseen hook and an invisible line which is long enough to let [us] wander to the ends of the world and still bring [us] back with a twitch upon the thread” (The Complete Father Brown Stories by G. K. Chesterton). We are made from a relationship and for a relationship.

For many of us, our understanding of relationships and the roles we play in them was first exposed to us through the domestic church, ecclesia domestica. It is in the family that we learn how to sacrifice, how to give, how to receive, how to relate, and how to live out the greatest commandment: love. The things learned through our families brought us monks to the monastery, where we seek God through the way of life He laid before us as a means to the fulfillment of resting in a face-to-face relationship with Him for all eternity. Moreover, joining a monastery does not remove us from our familial relationships, the relationships that laid the foundation. Rather, it helps them develop and mature, aiding in the call of St. Benedict to foster peace and a fervent love for the brethren.

These monastic family weekends are valuable opportunities to reflect on relationships of the past and the present, helping us look toward the future with hope and love, and as Abbot Benedict said in his homily, “letting that love take us beyond ourselves in order to find our true home, which is with God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

—Br. Francis Todd, OSB

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