These months have been difficult ones for all of us. Our best laid plans have been shelved. The patterns of our daily life have changed in ways that we could not have anticipated or imagined even six months ago. The brutal events which have erupted in these last days have fueled our sense of helplessness in the face of this virus and the endemic racism of our country.
This has been true for us in all the houses of our Order, and most especially here at Holy Cross Monastery, as it has for you. We are grateful that the fourteen brothers in residence have remained healthy, as have our three brothers in a nearby nursing home. These months of being cut off from our guests and Associates, with the closing of our monastery church to the public for worship, have been jarring and unsettling.
We have been seeking to envision various possibilities for our future life and ministry. Safety of our guests and brothers is of course our main concern. But the impact of implementing the procedures and guidelines necessary to ensure that safety is extremely heavy. It would include a very significant reduction of our guest capacity and a retreat experience that would be both unfavorable as well as fiscally unsustainable.
Given these constraints, the community has decided with sadness to keep the guesthouse closed until mid-January 2021.
As many of you know, almost half of our income is generated by our guesthouse ministry. So this decision has serious financial ramifications for us and for our staff. By the end of June, most of our staff will be laid off. We will of course monitor the situation in the coming months and make whatever realistic adjustments need to be made. And we hope that when we do reopen, we will be able to rehire them.
We continue to hold you all in our daily prayers. Please pray for us, for our country, and for our world-wide community during this pandemic.
