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Through the gracious generosity of the monks at St. Procopius Abbey I have been learning to make wine using the grapes of their vineyard and the fruit of their orchard. Five years of "vinting" have been completed and the grapes of 2011 are now in their respective fermentation jugs while the vintage of 2010 is ready for a final wine tasting review by the monastic community.
Now that the 2011 season has ended activities in the vineyard are underway as weather permits. These activities include trellis repair and general maintenance. Next season will the first for me without my longtime wine making mentor, Br. George Popovics, who died August 4, 2011 at the age of 91.I hope that if he looks down on the current activity he will be happy that the work he carried on from those who went before him is still continuing in the Abbey's 125 year tradition.
To round out my vineyard work I am teaching a course in wine biology and chemistry at Benedictine University.
I have added a few pictures of the process for viewing. If you are interested in participating in this process please contact me via e-mail. Or if you are interested in the monastic lifestyle and might even like spending a weekend staying with the monks and getting a feel for their life please vist the abbey's web site.
On a note, other than wine, I took my vows as an Oblate of St. Procopius on Sunday, November 14th, 2010 and am still an Oblate in
good standing! :-) If you might be interested in
Oblate life please visit the Oblate web page.
Some Other Thoughts
If you have been following any current historical commentary in the media we are now at the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic. So to weigh in on that I will make a couple of notes here. First there appears to be a belief that a) there was true heroism on the Titanic in that women and children survived disproportionate to men (Look up the statistics: in general, this is true.) and b) that is a pious myth. (Based on a Swedish study of 18 maritime disasters.)
Okay, in 16 of the 18 disasters the Swedish study covered men survived in larger proportions than women and children. The exceptions were the Titanic and the HMS Birkenhead. (FYI: The Birkenhead struck a rock about 2 miles off the coast of South Africa. The captain ordered the women and children into the only available lifeboats and ordered the men to stand in ranks on the deck while this was done. The men were then allowed to abandon ship and swim for it. Few made it.)
My opinion? I'll go with the Titanic and the Birkenhead. Would you rather celebrate self-sacrifice (And this is Darwin talking! Save the females and children: They represent the future!) or "it's all about ME!"? Those other ships of "every man for himself" give no one hope for the future of the human race. We give Medals of Honor to those who do for others. Not those who are interested in self-preservation.
In that spirt I offer two quotes on the issue of sacrifice (or not): One from G.K.Chesterton on death and one from Rudyard Kipling on self-sacrifice on the HMS Birkeenhead. Each deals with death and how we can (or won't) handle it and sacrifice (or not) when we are challenged.
G.K. Chesterton:
A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying.
He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide,
and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.
No philosopher, I fancy, has ever expressed this romantic riddle with adequate lucidity, and I certainly have not done so. But Christianity has done more:
it has marked the limits of it in the awful graves of the suicide and the hero, showing the distance between him who dies for the sake of living and him who
dies for the sake of dying.
Rudyard Kipling (on the sinking of the HMS Birkenhead and the soldiers and sailors who loaded the lifeboats with the women and children and then . . .)
To take your chance in the thick of a rush, with firing all about,
Is nothing so bad when you've cover to 'and, an' leave an' likin' to shout;
But to stand an' be still to the Birken'ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew,
An' they done it, the Jollies -- 'Er Majesty's Jollies -- soldier an' sailor too!
Their work was done when it 'adn't begun; they was younger nor me an' you;
Their choice it was plain between drownin' in 'eaps an' bein' mopped by the screw,
So they stood an' was still to the Birken'ead drill, soldier an' sailor too.
More other stuff . . .
And with a nod the FR. James Flint (and his sermon on 4/29) I present a quote from Dorthy Sayers on how we live (or don't) our daily lives. (FYI: Dorthy also said "I always have
a quotation for everything - it saves original thinking.")
Work should be looked upon—not as a drudgery to be undergone for the purpose of making money, but as a way of life in which the nature of man
should find its proper exercise and delight and so fulfill itself to the glory of God…Work is not, primarily, a thing one does to live, but the thing
one lives to do. It is, or it should be, the full expression of the worker's faculties, the thing in which he finds spiritual, mental, and bodily
satisfaction, and the medium in which he offers himself to God.
Last Updated 05/12/12
Send questions/mail to greg at munie.org