Mom's Visit!

My mom came to visit last week! It was a very quick trip, but really good to see her and show her the house and a few highlights of Northern Idaho!

Here we are at Cataldo Mission, the oldest church in Idaho built by the Jesuit Missionaries and the Coeur d'Alene tribe. You can just walk right into the Church, which is beautiful and sits high on a hill like a king on a throne. We also checked out Wallace, an old mining town and learned all about mining. Other than that, we mostly hung around in Coeur d'Alene and had fun together, despite the snow!

Latest Projects

So, since The Mary House is requiring a lot of patient waiting, I thought I'd update you on some other things I've been working on. They are far less important, obviously, but it does help a lot to have something enjoyable to work on and create since this has been the longest winter of my life! Don't get me wrong, there is still plenty of work to do for The Mary House, but what do we do when we are not working??

KNIT!
(Hold the old lady jokes, please!)
The first is my knitted sweater:

It doesn't look like much, but it is HOURS and HOURS worth of knitting. So far I have the back and half of the front done. I'll post it again when it is completed (don't hold your breath!) We watch movies or listen to books on tape a lot, so I knit along with that. So far we've listened to "Love Among the Chickens" by P.G. Wodehouse, The Hobbit and now we are making our way through The Lord of the Rings trilogy. I don't remember who recommended Wodehouse, but he is really funny, so that was a good discovery. Also, I had read the Hobbit before, but I really like it- it's a good inspiration for the adventures of life. Now I am finally reading (okay, listening to) the Lord of the Rings, which has been on my list for a while! I also listen to Hebrew or Arabic language tapes once in a while by way of getting ready for my trip to the Holy Land- only three more weeks!!

Also, the weather is slowly getting better. This week we've had three nice days in a row!! So our leaky roof was finally able to be fixed and we started preparing land to put in a garden.

A quality I hadn't noticed in myself has recently emerged: I like to dive into huge projects and skip all the smaller projects that normal people would do leading up to it. Example number one: I went straight from knitting basic scarves to a huge sweater. Example number two: I wanted to make our garden huge, and I have never gardened.

Gail is helpful in bringing me back down to earth sometimes so we settled on this as a good size, even though its still big. We have a lot of people willing to help us with things, so we'll see how it goes!! I've been reading up on gardening organically, companion planting etc. Yesterday I planted some seeds inside; hopefully they'll grow. We won't be able to plant much for at least another month (It was still snowing last week and is predicted to snow again Thursday and Friday!. Everyone looks at a particular mountain in town and when there is no snow left on that mountain, that's when they plant their gardens. By the looks of things, there will be no gardening whatsoever this year!

In other news...we went biking in the Snake River Canyon with Eric and Liz this weekend. It was GORGEOUS!! Unfortunately, we all forgot our cameras, so you'll just have to believe me!

Mountain Lions and Desert Fathers

We went on retreat this weekend! Thanks to a generous couple, we were allowed to stay at a beautiful lodge for free. We were way up in Clark Fork, Idaho...a tiny, tiny town right next to the Bitterroot Mountains which create the Montana border. It was stunningly beautiful and the weather was too.

A special feature of the lodge was an assortment of stuffed animals (not the cute kind) in the kitchen. Most striking was this mountain lion. There were also deer- one which I slammed my head into as I stood up from rearranging chairs- DOH! (a deer! a female deer!)Anyway, it was a little hard to eat with these things staring at you...for a variety of reasons!

Another key feature of the weekend was reading quotes from the Desert Fathers; I think this was the first I had ever read from them. We mainly read from Pope Benedict's writings (so beautiful and profound!!) but at night we would go through sayings of the Desert Fathers as if they were fortune cookies. Here is an example:

"Abba Anthony said 'I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, 'What can get through such snares?' Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility.' "

aahhh...good stuff.

SO, we left feeling very nourished, comforted, renewed, more aware of the beauty of Idaho, and very sure that we are not into taxidermy.

Thoughts on Divine Mercy

The feast of Divine Mercy was last Sunday, so I thought I'd pay tribute... even if it is a week late!

This feast was recently instituted in 2000 by John Paul II at the canonization of St. Faustina- a humble Polish nun who the Lord chose to reveal Himself to to spread His message of mercy for the whole world. St. Faustina recieved many revelations from our Lord which she records in her diary: "The Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska: Divine Mercy in My Soul." I've read this twice, and would benefit from reading it twenty-thousand more times. (In other words, I recommend it!)

Unfortunately, I don't have this book with me now, but I thought this month's Magnificat piece "The Breakthrough of Mercy" by Fr. Richard Veras had some points worth retelling:

Fr. Veras points out that all of us relate to a lack of trust in Christ's mercy. Why is this? Because we are finite beings and mercy is infinite, thus it is beyond our mentality. We are quite merciless to ourselves and those around us, so we find it difficult to believe in and trust in His mercy for us. Fr. Veras reminds us of the Book of Revelation where the devil is referred to as the "accuser" who "continually accuses us of our sins, looking only at our finite actions and denying that they can be conquered by infinite love." We comply with this lie since Christ's infinite love is so far beyond our imagination- but Christ came not to condemn, but to save!

We need to experience mercy, Fr. Veras emphasizes, rather than just have the idea of it. Because of our finite mentality, we must be reminded continually of merciful love by having it breakthrough to us from others. Two primary ways are through the sacrament of confession and in true Christian friendships.

We (I) must develop a more merciful attitude toward ourselves and others, stemming from a deep awareness of the Lords merciful love for us. St. Faustina was told to always conclude her prayer (The Chaplet of Divine Mercy, now our prayer too!) with "Jesus, I trust in You!" We have to remember to trust in the Lord- that He loves us, forgives us and desires great things for us.

St. Faustina died in 1938 and so her life overlapped with JPII and he knew of her as a young priest. It is just awesome to look back at history and think about what the Lord was working in these souls and how He gave such gifts to the world through them. It is awesome too, to think about what the Lord desires to work in our souls.

The Church gives us these handy to do lists to carry this work out:

Convert the sinner

Instruct the ignorant

Counsel the doubtful

Comfort the sorrowful

Bear wrongs patiently

Forgive injuries

Pray for the living and the dead

Feed the hungry

Give drink to the thirsty

Clothe the naked

Shelter the homeless

Visit the sick

Visit those in prison

Bury the dead

And finally, this prayer from the Chaplet:

"Eternal God, in whome mercy is endless, and the treasury of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us, and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments, we might not despair, nor become despondent, but with great confidence, submitourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself."