Bless This Home!

Blog By Katherine Frazier

I have the great joy to tell you about our first few weeks here in the Collaborative Dominican Novitiate, and we’ve certainly been busy!

These last few weeks have been full of firsts: our first course at Aquinas Institute, our first house meeting, our first time visiting St. Dominic Priory to spend time with the student friars, our first time cooking for this community and so many more! As you can imagine, we novices have at times felt overwhelmed as we made this transition into living in St. Louis and life here at the CDN.

All of us have complicated descriptions of what “home” means to us. We’ve traveled to live in different cities and countries from where we were born and grew into adulthood, and we have family scattered all over. In addition, we have our home congregations which we spent last year getting to know better during our candidate year. Now all of us find ourselves calling St. Louis home for this year. I still have much to learn about this city, especially in finding my way around this place, but I have begun to find places that make St. Louis special, whether sitting in Forest Park or exploring some of the local festivals.

To help us transition into our new home and into our new community, at the end of our first week

here, we all proceeded to bless this house where we’ll be living over the next year. During our prayer, we went through the house, reminding ourselves of the value of each room and of the people who inhabit those rooms. We were reminded of the prayerfulness and contemplative atmosphere of our chapel and of the ways that the kitchen nourishes our community through the food prepared there and the conversations that happen while helping one another prepare for a meal or cleaning up afterwards. As we visited each other’s rooms, we each had the opportunity to explain why objects in them were meaningful to us.

At the end of our blessing, the knowledge that this was the place I’m calling home for this year had seeped a bit more deeply into me. This doesn’t mean that the process of transition is over yet, but the difference now is that I have a place where I can ground myself before I go forth again to explore all the newness in my life. I know I can go into my room and see the quilt made by a family friend and the icon I was given at the beginning of my volunteer year. I know I can go into the chapel and find a place where I can rest in God and into the kitchen and find the pots and pans and ingredients to make dinner. Finally, I know that I am creating this home with my community members, and that together we are creating relationships that will ground one another throughout this year.