This week in Madonna House we have been
very mindful of the world and its travails as we go about our daily work and
affairs. Our prayers and offering of our lives has been much taken up with what
is happening in so many places right now, and the fears and angers so many are
carrying right now.
That being said, the pace of our life is
picking up somewhat. Guest numbers remain high, with new guests coming in still
every week. Somehow we find work for all of them to do, the men at the farm
mostly doing some of the clean up jobs that couldn’t be done in the crush of
summer work, the women pitching in wherever. One of those ‘wherevers’ is the
kitchen which is clearly moving into high gear of pre-Christmas preparations.
Yes, I know it is more than a month away,
but we are a big family, and it takes a lot of doing just to keep us fed the
usual three meals a day. The big feasts of the year require careful advanced
planning and many things made ahead of time and frozen. I believe they did the
shortbreads this week.
I was going to say that it is hard to
believe Christmas is so close, what with the dry ground and the warm
temperatures, but we woke up this morning to snow on the ground and a nice
chill to the air. Hurray – winter is come… at least for today.
It isn’t all work, of course. We had one
of our sporadic ‘movie nights’ this week, watching a film on Aung San Suu Kyi,
the democracy and human rights heroine of Myanmar whose party recently won a
decisive victory in that country. We had a staff meeting one night this week,
just for the staff assigned to the ‘training center’, our main house location,
on the subject of ‘what does it mean to be assigned to the training center?’ It
was a rich and thoughtful conversation, as our meetings usually tend to be.
The ‘liturgy class’ began for our guests.
What is the liturgy class, you may ask? It is a venerable tradition in MH,
going back more than 50 years now, in which the guests under the leadership of
three MH staff, learn about the Advent season, its richness and beauty, and
about our MH customs around this season which are many and varied.
This ‘learning’ is not academic and
notional. It is hands-on and incarnational. That is, we have them actually be
the ones doing the customs and leading the community through some of them.
Today they are gathering evergreen branches to make an Advent wreath, which
they will do later this week. As the season progresses they will do St.
Nicholas cookies, St. Lucy bread, and various other lovely traditional things.
All of which I will be happy to tell you about as the weeks go on.
In the same pre-Advent vein of things, we
had a music practice last night to go over some of the Advent hymns, including
a new one written by our choir director and a hymn written for the Year of
Mercy.
In my own week I had the official book
launch for Idol Thoughts, going
into Ottawa for that happy event. Three other new books from Justin Press were
launched at the same time, including one on the Canadian Saints,
to which I contributed a chapter. While the event didn’t have the turnout
we had hoped for it, we did sell quite a few books and it was an enjoyable
evening.
The bush crew has officially launched,
one of the main works of our men in the winter months. This is the work of
cutting down trees and chopping them up for firewood. It is arduous, highly
skilled, and dangerous work. Fr. Louis who heads it up reports being quite
pleased with the men he has working with him.
Another job which is not quite underway
but is in the offing is renovations to the house I live in, called Regina
Pacis, where currently five priest staff live. It is a rambling old house which
grew in stages, and one of the older parts of the house is badly in need of
renovations. So far we have only begun the process of moving all the furniture,
etc., out of that part of the house.
Well, what else is there to say? While
our life has had a serious tone to it lately, the world being what it is, we
are not without peace, joy, and beauty, knowing that all God asks any of us to
do is to be faithful to the life He has given us and the work He has asked of
us, and that in this we are making the best contribution to the peace and
healing of the world that we can do. But you are all in our prayers, through it
all.
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