Spring 2026 • By Katie Vogel
Assisi to Elmira

On Spacious Repetition and Art

At the beginning of March, two friends and I traveled from Florence to Assisi to venerate the mortal remains of Saint Francis. Before heading to the Basilica of St. Francis, we ducked into the Basilica where St. Clare is buried. As we entered the church, we heard the sisters singing lauds in the chapel where the crucifix through which Christ spoke to Francis at the beginning of his spiritual journey hangs. I felt God was especially near. In the company of that knowledge, my mind wandered to another place where God’s proximity is always abundantly clear: the crypt at Mount Saviour Monastery.

At the center of the sanctuary’s crypt is a French gothic statue of the Virgin Mary. The brothers gather around her to sing the Salve Regina, the Daily Office’s final hymn. They pass her every morning on their way to Vigils. When I was down there alone this past July, I would walk in circles around her or sit next to her, making mental notes of the statue’s formal features and how they change in the light of the votive candles gathered around the base. I would look at how the Christ child in the Virgin’s arms clung to her veil. I found myself observing the damage on the back of the statue, hypothesizing that it was likely attached to a wall at some point in its long life.

One afternoon, I noticed someone had left a miraculous medal in the folds of the Virgin’s dress. My primary intention for going to the crypt had been to take advantage of the low light to learn how to use a camera a friend had let me borrow for the week, but I ended up spending far more time contemplating the statue. In this repetitive contemplation, I also felt God nearby.

One of the gifts of Orein is the space to engage in this kind of spontaneous repetition—the kind that wears a little hole in your consciousness. It’s a kind that God reaches through, to share an idea, an invitation. I find that I can’t ever anticipate the particular quality of any given invitation of this kind, but, as the monastic orders and Church Fathers figured out far faster than I did, these invitations are always bound to occur in the presence of beauty, art, and the people who make both. ︎



——Katie Vogel, Orein ‘24, ‘25

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