From warm to cold

January 10, 2010

The Baptism of Our Lord

Peace and Good,

This past week I was out in California giving a retreat to the seminarians at St. Patrick Seminary in Menlo Park (San Francisco). They are a good group of men. There were 56 of them from many different lands and backgrounds. They come from many of the different dioceses on the West Coast.

The theme of the retreat was the priesthood (this being the year of the priest). They especially seemed to enjoy the pastoral content - experiences that I have had in my priesthood.

Being in California, I received a jolt one morning when we had a c 4.0 earthquake (enough to feel it but not to knock anything over). This was only a couple of days before they had the much greater earthquake in northern California.

Thursday I flew to Chicago where I over-nighted, and then the next morning on to Minneapolis. You should have seen the looks on people's faces when I went through the airport with my sandals and no socks.

This week I am giving a retreat on the Gospel of Luke to a group of the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, MN. In California it was in the 50's and 60's, the other morning they reported that it was -19 during the night not to far from here.

I finished two books. One was for my spiritual reading: Saint Ignatius by Christoper Hollis. This book is quite old (I picked it up at a parish where they were throwing it out). It is written by an Englishman and shows a lot of 1920's English humor. It wasn't as detailed as I would have hoped, but it did give me a basic background on the conversion and life of St. Ignatius of Loyola.

The second book was Flannery: A life of Flannery O'Connor by Brad Gooch. This was an excellent book. Flannery was a Catholic fiction writer in the south after the war. She died of Lupus in the early 60's. She wrote mostly fiction, and much of it has a gothic overtone. Yet, she was very feisty, always ready with a retort to what she considered to be inane or hypocritical. She was a fervent Catholic (having her St. Thomas Aquinas right by her bedside). I want to read more about her and also read some of her stories. She fascinates me. I use one of her quotes in my homilies, "For those who are in love with God, they slowly realize that life is part of a divine conspiracy."

Here is my coming calendar:

01/08/10 - 01/14/10: Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, Little Falls, MN - Sisters' Retreat

01/16/10 - 01/20/10: St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church, Spring, Hill, FL - Parish Mission

01/23/10 - 01/28/10: St. Gregory Catholic Church, Plantation, FL - Parish Mission

01/30/10 - 02/04/10: St. Gregory, the Great Catholic Church, San Diego, CA - Parish Mission

02/06/10 - 02/11/10: Our Lady of Perpetual Help Catholic Church, Lakeside, CA - Parish Mission

02/13/10 - 02/18/10: Holy Trinity Catholic Church, El Cajon, CA - Parish Mission

02/20/10 - 02/25/10: St. Aloysius Catholic Church, Leonardtown, MD - Parish Mission

(Sometimes it makes me tired just thinking about it!)

God bless and

Shalom

fr. Jude