Graduation

Hello, just a quick post because I graduated on Tuesday, which I was very excited about, and so thought I would share with you... Mhari the nurse! This is me with my lovely mother and father, outside the glorious Holy Name Church. Had such a nice day and then went to a most excellent Ceilidh so it was all nice. God is really very good to me.

And another thing...

I just wanted to add this from Joee Blogs, A Catholic Londoner

Our Purpose and Method

...The book is really a collection of essays written in 1905 when Abbot Aelred and the Benedictine Community to which he belonged on Caldey Island (just off the coast of Wales) was still Anglican. However with much joy the entire community bar two converted to Catholicism in 1913 and 15 years later moved to Prinknash where there is still a Benedictine community. The community at Prinknash has also given rise to Farnborough Abbey (picture on the left) and Pluscarden Abbey (photo on the right) no less.

"Although written in the Anglican days" Abbot Alfred Spencer of Pluscarden Abbey writes "this essay on monastic life was throught to be masterly by Abbot Columba Marmion who read extracts of it to some of the professors and students of Sant' Anselmo, Rome, who agreed it was one of the best expositions of monastic principles that they had ever listened to."

Here are some of my favourite paragraphs, the first of which I read often for my own personal edification:

God has given each one of us the germ of the gifts and powers necessary for the particular purpose He has planned for us, and in that state alone shall we find our true development and most perfect obedience to His Will. For us, severally and individually, this plan which God's perfect Love and Wisdom has decreed, is our Vocation, whatever or whevever it may be: whether in the shop or factory, on sea or land, in a profession or trade, the Priesthood or the Cloister, of itself matters nothing. The main essential is, that we should occupy the exact place God wills for us, and do out duty in that state, so that our lives become what He meant them to be. In the sight of God the good Religious is of himself no better than the good secular, the good Priest no better than the good business man: if God intended the Priest to be a Priest, and the business man to be such, that is enough: in their respective states they are, by His grace, to attain that measure of perfection which He requires of them, and neither can change place with the other by his own choice without going against the Will of God.

...To realize one's Vocation, then, is to correspond to God's Will...

... It may be asked in what manner does God show us His appointed path? and (sic) the answer is to be found in the training of our childhood, our special environment, our friends and our natural tastes and disposition. The call of God comes to us by prayer, in the crises of our lives, by the apparently accidental meetings with those who opened our minds to fresh aspirations - in short, by the careful consideration of our capabilites and attractions.

A Season of Waiting

Getting distracted by facebook when blogging is irritating, just deleted my post by mistake.

I don't think I'm going to be blogging much about discernment for a little while. With the blessing of my Spiritual Director, I'm taking a step back for a little while. I need to come to terms with where I am now, and I think I can only do that if I don't try to work out exactly where I'm heading in the future. I guess too Advent is a great time for this. More than any other time of year it's the season for waiting. I'm sure if people want to reflect on this they can find marvellous works by spiritual giants on the net, I want to talk a very little about what it means to me. I'm not quite sure what I want to say... we'll see I guess.

At mass today Fr J told us that this Sunday is traditionally called wilderness Sunday... I don't know if it is(!) but it makes a bit of sense... we're not at the begining of the time of waiting, when we think, "Yes! The time of waiting is here! How exciting that God calls us to live in a period of waiting!" and we're not near enough to the end to look with eager anticipation. Next week the Gospel is going to be John's baptism of repentance... and we celebrate Gaudete Sunday because the Lord's coming is a little nearer. But this week we are preparing with St John the Baptist in the wilderness, which (for me at least) has lost it's glamour.

Last year, this time last year, I had just come back from New York. I went expecting the Lord to speak to me, to let me know one way or the other if He wanted me to be a CFR sister, of if he had other plans for me. He didn't let me know. I faced Advent last year in uncertainty, God gave me a blessed and fairly peaceful time of waiting and discernment, which I suppose has prepared me a little for this Advent's far more intense, and far more painful, period of waiting and discernment.

There are a couple of questions I want to look at, and to try to understand, over the next few months. So hopefully I can blog about those. This is supposed to be a discernment blog, and if having not the slightest clue about where God is leading me is discernment, I'm definately there! On Wednesday I'm meeting Fr K (Spi Di) again and I want to talk to him about how one can love God so much... and yet love someone else as well. Right now I don't understand how that's possible, which is probably very offensive to those married people who love God so much more perfectly than I do. However I don't get it, so perhaps when Fr K sheds some light on what it means to love God in marriage I can talk to you more about that. I haven't stopped discerning the religious life, I'm certainly pausing for a while, but it's still there as a possibility. But now it's Advent, and I'm waiting.

(this picture is just beause I like it)