Hope all is going well on the home-front. We miss you alot. Hoping your silence is golden, to match the golden retirement years you are just starting to enjoy. (well, when the workers aren’t tearing out walls and ripping out pipes, I mean).

I agree with the other dear commenter who, in commenting on another post, said that this is truly a Contemplative ‘Heaven’….perhaps not so much the typo at all!

And thank you for the Our Fathers!! I’ll go listen to both postings, now.

St. Therese. Act of Oblation to Merciful Love.

Father Jordan Aumann on Therese and Elizabeth.

Try googling “martyrdom of love” as well; I think it appeared before St. Therese de Lisieux – perhaps culminating fully in her as something meant for the world to finally grasp?

I’m thinking about the phrase “martyrdom of love” again. By what means did Therese and Elizabeth effect this? Suffering and prayer?

He wants to go back home. Italy is a garden, it reminds me of the shire. Italians are food fanatics, more so than the Brits. Tolkien had the whole food thing dialed, but it seems to me that the Italians actually live the Shire experience as best it can be lived in reality. We’d walk down the road and stuff was just growing wild, plums, figs, peaches. You eat dinner and go for a walk and pick fruit, get to town and have gelato, and walk back and have glass of wine. Plus the father-in-law is only a slightly taller than most Hobbits. I figure it is a good analogy. Not to mention all the delightful munchings and crunchings.

French have a great food culture too. But I don’t know much about the people. They invented Cognac. That was a gift to civilization. Thanks Gab, please pass that on to the French. I’d like to have dinner with St. Therese and find out more about French culture some time. I hope that is a reality. Christ alludes to it I’d really like to have dinner with St. Teresa, that would be a feast. Spanish have a huge food culture too.

“I tell you, I will not drink of this fruit of the vine from now on until that day when I drink it anew with you in my Father’s kingdom.” Mt 26:29

A little Lectio. Consider how powerful a ritual is eating that the Lord would mention it. He knew what was going to happen the next day, but he still thought it important to mention it in this context. He could of said we will all play a game or sing or walk or work in health and joy, but he thought that it was significant enough to mention that someday we will have a glass of wine together.

So yeah, dinner with St. Teresa is a likely possibility. I would avail myself to it as much as possible.

As for languages, I always just wanted to learn the Pater Noster in many of them. (Guess one couldn’t ask about the next bus with that, but it’s ok.) I can speak a little conversational French (”Hello, how are you? I’m very well, thank you — and you?”), and I practised “Je’taime” until it was terribly believable. I can communicate a little in sign language–I particularly excel at simple phrases like, “My cat is white” — which haven’t come in awfully handy so far). Actually, I have spoken with deaf people, and probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen, except for Caravaggio paintings and Ireland’s quilt, and a newborn, is the Our Father signed. Learning it was my “answer” to yoga’s way of greeting the day. You know?

They keep talking about economic crisis here, and how Italy will soon become like Argentina a few years ago. It may be, but I know we’d survive because we have everything we need. God is so good.