Advent,
as we have
said
before, looks forward not only to the birth of Jesus but to all the
events and seasons of his time on earth
including
his passion, death, resurrection and
sending of the Spirit. So it moves us to
consider the span of our lives and our times and the seasons we have
lived
through. In addition, here at
Suffering in itself has no value
but
suffering
shared with
Christ’s passion is his wonderful gift.
How can we describe this sharing?
It is impossible in human language. We participate in God’s
redemptive
work.
That is how it gets accomplished.
But we can’t say: “We did it”. And
we’d better not say to
God: “Do it yourself!”. In the Epistle to the Ephesians, the
relationship between Christ and the Church is so close it can be
portrayed in
terms of a marriage and can even provide the model for intimacy between
husbands
and wives.
In
Xto,
Father
Martin
During
the month of March, The Friends of Mount Saviour
studied
the book Called to Participate by Mark Searle. Each
Sunday, a
guest lecturer made a presentation to enable fruitful
discussions: Fr.
Martin, Rev. Han van den Blink and Dr. Patricia Schoelles,
ssj, (pictured above) and John Boler.
This year’s garden was deliberately downsized but still produced 1500 lbs. of fresh organic vegetables for the monastery. The stellar producer was potatoes. From 10 lbs. of seed potatoes we reaped a bounty of over 450 lbs! Tomatoes, which we still had fresh until after Thanksgiving, added another 475lbs.
The orchard
harvest
was downsized
this year too; not by us but by nature. We still had a respectfully
moderate
and manageable crop of almost 9,000 lbs. of apples which, thanks again to many volunteer guest helpers, was picked in a
record time
of less than two weeks. Working against record heat for early Oct. our
cider
team, Brs. John, Thomas and Roger, pressed over 400 gallons of cider.
Because
we didn’t raise any beef cattle this year the apple pomace was given to
the
sheep instead. Our flock quickly adjusted to the unexpected addition to
their
diet and came running to meet Br. Thomas whenever they heard the
tractor coming
with another load!
Future Events for 2008
May 4th – Kevin Seasoltz will be giving the 6th Annual Damasus Winson Lecure series.
OBLATES: we may need to contact you in the future for upcoming oblate events. If you would like to be contacted for these events, please send you email address to Fr. Martin at frmartin@msaviour.org . Please remember us in prayer and, if
possible, also in your estate planning and will. Our legal title is - The Benedictine Foundation of New York State. |
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E-mail: info@msaviour.org Guest Brother: guest@msaviour.org |
Phone: (607) 734-1688
Fax: (607) 734-1689 |