MOTHER DILECTA'S GOLDEN JUBILEE

During the year 2020 in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, Mother Dilecta Planansky celebrated her Golden Jubilee, 50 years of vowed life. A celebration with family and friends had been planned, but due to the pandemic, our public celebration was canceled. In spite of this disappointment, on the Feast of Corpus Christi, Mother Dilecta with great grace gave herself fully to our intimate celebration at the monastery. She radiated an interior joy as she renewed her Vows to God through the Community of Our Lady of the Rock. Priests in relationship to Our Lady of the Rock said Masses for her intentions in their churches all over the country. The monastery's Oblates and friends joined Mother Dilecta in prayer and thanksgiving for her vocation from a distance. She shared her Jubilee date with Mother Scholastica Lenkner who celebrated with the Community of Regina Laudis in Connecticut. Our prayer is that when the pandemic is over, Mother Dilecta's family and friends come to the monastery to celebrate her jubilee in person.

Mother Dilecta was born to Wilmer and Bobbie Planansky in Wheatland, Wyoming in the Diocese of Cheyenne. She was given the name Mary at Baptism. Her paternal grandparents were Bohemian, having come to Nebraska in 1872 from the vicinity of Prague, Czechoslovakia. Her grandfather’s family was Catholic and he was baptized on his deathbed. Mother’s maternal ancestors were primarily British, but included Chippewa Native American Indians. Her mother was a convert to Catholicism. After living briefly in Wyoming, Florida, and Nebraska, her family home was established in Baldwin Park, California, in the archdiocese of Los Angeles near her maternal grandparents who had recently moved to California after living in Colorado and Nebraska.

From kindergarten through high school Mother attended public schools in Baldwin Park. She attended Mount St. Antonio College in Walnut CA for a year and graduated from the University of San Diego College for Women with a B.A. in Sociology with a minor in Philosophy in 1964.

While in college Mother also studied oil painting and pottery, was on the staff of the college literary magazine, and wrote poetry, a craft she has developed and enjoys to this day. During her junior year of college Mother participated in an Anthropology field trip to Southern Mexico. The experience opened her to the complexities of another culture, including at that time the necessity of practicing one’s Catholic Faith in secret due to the Communist influence in the village. She appreciates that her studies in Sociology, and Philosophy prepared her for more in depth reading of Papal and Social Encyclicals, particularly those of Pope Saint John Paul II.

Mother Dilecta entered the Abbey of Regina Laudis in June, 1966 and professed her Final Vows on Ash Wednesday, February 1977. Much of her monastic work has been in relation to rhythms and cycles of creation—in the vegetable gardens and vineyard, raising pigs, and especially in helping to establish the Abbey dairy. In addition to hand-milking cows, her responsibilities included shoveling manure, training and feeding cows, and care of the barn. She also for many years at the Abbey was a source of stability for members of one of the Lay communities forming in relationship to the monastic community.

Mother Dilecta moved to the Abbey’s foundation, Our Lady of the Rock in 1985.

Her farm work at the monastery has focused on the care of the gardens, the dairy including milking, feeding and care of the barn, overseeing the Scottish Highland herd, feeding the pigs, and organizing the haying. Mother Dilecta and her chocolate lab Shanley were inseparable for 14 years until Shanley's passing this year. She continues to write poetry, a sample of which you may savor here:

RUMINATION
The lastly milked cow lumbering and licking
leaves reluctantly the hay-laden barn.
Reluctantly—not I, as the sky
catching my eye beckons,
beckons beyond morning chores;
(all else can wait, now that nature’s abundance
brims and cools in stainless-steel stillness.)
Now do as the cows will do—
follow the path to the point
and gaze, while they graze.
The mid-morning ferry rounds the bend busily
bound for town errands (with passengers in tow.)
But read the autumn sky—
It’s still streaked with
the colors of dawning—
a time to yawn, ruminate, delineate and embrace
those shapes of deep desire that were on waking
only, darkly glimpsed.

Mother Dilecta is the sacristan and liturgist at Our Lady of the Rock, offices she carries out daily in a quiet, hidden way. She gives countless hours to preparing the altar, chapel, and priests’ vestments for our liturgies. For Sundays and feastday she makes beautiful flower arrangements for the sanctuary that express the liturgical season and mystery being celebrated. As the monastery’s liturgist, Mother Dilecta daily anticipates any changes in the Ordo or rubrics so that our small Community can carry on our work of praise in the Liturgy of the Hours and celebration of Mass in the most beautiful way possible. She carefully chooses readings for the Office of Matins, offering reflections that span from the early Church Fathers of the 1st and 2nd centuries to contemporary writings of the Popes of this century. Mother Dilecta's unfailing presence at the Divine Office is a source of stability for our community and witnesses to her fidelity to her contemplative vocation in the heart of the Church.