This past year our parish Vocations Committee has brought some special days to our attention: International Marriage Day (around St Valentine’s), Good Shepherd Sunday (after Easter, when we pray for vocations to priesthood), Buy Your Priest a Beer Day (yes, that’s really a thing). We have one coming up this week—and one that may present an unfamiliar notion for us—Day of Prayer for Cloistered Life.

This Thursday the Church celebrates the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin, the day when Joachim and Anne bring the child Mary to Jerusalem, where, as legend tells, she danced on the steps to the altar. The feast speaks of Mary’s special relationship to God’s plan, many aspects of which were “cloistered”, in a sense— “treasured in her heart.”

While priests and deacons, active religious orders (like the sisters who work in schools and hospitals) may be more familiar to us, cloistered religious have a privileged place in the Church’s life. My brother’s a Benedictine— their monastery’s chief is to pray constantly for the Church and the world. We have Benedictine monks at Mt Saviour in Elmira, Carmelite nuns in Elysburg, and the semi-cloistered Capuchin Sisters in Bastress.

The cloister concept has long inspired works of art. Think of Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain, recounting his journey from a very worldly existence to a life of deep solitude. Or Rumer Godden’s novel In This House of Breded (with a film version starring Diana Rigg). More recently Mark Salzman’s Lying Awake (about Carmelite nuns) and Remy Rougeau’s All We Know of Heaven (about a Benedictine monk). Don’t forget the true life story of an actress who becomes an abbess: Then there are the movies: Into Great Silence (spoiler alert: there’s actually an uncomfortable lot of silence in this film) or Of Gods and Men (telling the story of Trappists martyred in 1900s Algeria) or God Is the Bigger Elvis (a brief documentary about actress turned abbess Dolores Hart).

Let’s pray for these men and women, who pray each day and hour for us. Maybe take up a book or watch a film to appreciate their lives, their sacrifices, their contributions to the Church, the living body of Christ.