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January 15, 2012 —

Hello!

January 15th! That is the midway point of this first month of the year already! It always amazes me how the days from Christmas to New Year’s and few days beyond are like the slow crawl on a roller-coaster. You creep to that top and then swoosh!!! You are flying so fast you can hardly b

reathe! So, hang on! Let’s hold tight to the Lord and we’ll be just fine!

If today weren’t a Sunday we would be celebrating the feast day of Saints Maurus and Placid – two Benedictine saints that St. Gregory the Great mentions in the book he wrote on the life of St. Benedict. St. Gregory and St. Benedict may have been alive for a few years at the same time although they did not know one another. St. Benedict died in 543 in Monte Cassino in Italy and St. Gregory was born in 540 in Sicily or Rome. His family was wealthy and had estates in both places. The stories that St. Gregory tells of St. Benedict have the weight of being nearly contemporaneous.

Tuesday, January 17th, is another feast of a great monastic saint – St. Anthony the Abbot or the Great. He was born in Egypt, also from a well-to-do family. His parents died leaving him to care for a younger sister. One day in Church he heard the Scriptures as if spoken directly to him and began his long journey to the desert. He was born in 251 and died in 356! He didn’t have an immediate conversion and call to live as a solitary. But he gradually moved toward that wilderness to live all for God. St. Athanasius of Alexandria, another great father of the Church, knew him personally and wrote his life. We are blessed to have this work today! I think you might be interested in learning more about him:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_the_Great

I’ll be attending a meeting for the Superiors of the North American houses of the Subiaco Congregation next week – so I’ll include a feast from next week too. January 25th is a big feast day – The Conversion of St. Paul! How grateful we all need to be that Saul became St. Paul in the beginnings of our faith as Catholics! He certainly was alive when Jesus walked on this earth but it seems clear that he never met Him in the flesh. He was a zealous, learned and devout Jewish man and set out to crush the wave of people who were following what he felt was not true. We know the story from the Scriptures about the day his life was changed and God blinded him to stop him in his tracks and have him take time to think, pray and listen. Acts of the Apostles 9:3-9 give one of the fullest accounts of the incident but St. Paul refers to his event again and again in his writings.

This Saturday we finally had a gathering of some of the people who built our new addition. Mark McCurn, the owner of Ninepoints Woodworking, and his wife, Annie, were able to come. He was our angel who helped us through that dark and hard time. He did so much negotiating, brain storming and plain old back-breaking work himself. His company acted as our contractor and completed the building. The project employed some wonderful people who made this all happen but it didn’t give Mark any real profit, that is, profit on this earth. His profit will be in heaven from this job! Lou and Charlie were here. These two men spent months here guiding the work and doing it themselves too. And many others came, some with their children. I was thinking of all the lives that physically touched the space where we live.To each of those people we say – “THANK YOU!”

All our love and prayers,

Mother Mary Elizabeth, OSB