The meetings are finished

January 31, 2011

We have finally finished out three week marathon of meetings. They were all productive and worthwhile, but they went on, and on, and on. The guardian announced Friday night that we would have private prayers for Saturday so people could sleep in a bit. (We usually have prayers and Mass at 7:15.) Everyone broke out in applause.

Saturday I took a quick trip up to Assisi for another meeting (what else). It went very well. It concerns the American friars who are serving there and the hope that we can get one or two more to volunteer to work there. It is a wonderful apostolate, but you have to learn Italian (that is the common langauge in the friary) and you have to be flexible. Living in Italy, there are always surprises. For example, getting up to and back from Assisi was a bit of a trick because there was a 24 hour train strike. It turns out that only certain trains were on strike, but it was almost impossible to find out which ones because the offices were all closed.

Tomorrow I fly out to the States and I will be there for a couple of weeks. On my way back to Rome, I will stop off in England, Scotland and Ireland.

I finished a couple of books. One was Beautiful Lies by Lisa Unger. It is a mystery novel about a young woman who finds out that her parents are not really her biological parents. It turns out that she and a number of other babies were kidnapped from their parents because the kidnappers thought that the parents were incapable of raising the children (because of violence, drugs, drink, etc.) It has quite a few surprises along the way. I enjoyed it.

A second book was Forever Odd by Dean Koontz. This is the third of the odd books that I have read. They are incredibly good, and I actually listen to them and the narrator is excellent. I think he has one more in the series so far, and I am going to try to find it in the States when I am over there.

We have had cold weather, but nothing compared with the east coast of the States. Here, 45 during the day is considered very cold.

Take care and
Shalom
fr. Jude