Up For Sale

 Yesterday, in the local Aspen newspaper, the front page story was that our monastery in Old Snowmass was up for sale.  The asking price is $150 million.  The monastery has 3600 acres of ranch and buildings.  It is in expensive Pitkin County.  So now that it is official, in the news, people are really sad, or curious enough to finally come up the seven miles from the highway to see the place.  As a Trappist monastery, it will be no more.  But as a ranch and a place for retreat and quiet, a spiritual center, if you will, I believe it will go on.  The new owners will be much better marketers and advertisers than the Trappists ever were.  The Trappists have not made any effort to let anyone know they are here since they stopped selling eggs decades ago in the local stores.  They don’t even wear their habits when they go anywhere.  The In Crowd, the ones who come here regularly, will miss individual Trappists with whom they have made friends, and the atmosphere of “Catholic” whatever that might mean to them.  Most of these people are pretty old, like their Trappist friends, and it is time to move on.  God is in charge and God has a plan.  Believe in Resurrection, that is change, on a radical scale.  If you want the same old, same old, you are looking only at the past.