Trip to France

I am blessed that most years I'm able to visit France with my wife--my wife is French. This year we spent about three weeks in France returning on July 3rd.

We spend only a short time in the Paris area with my niece who with her family lives in a beautiful town outside Paris (Celle St. Cloud), we spend most of our visit in central France where my wife's home is located. It is always an enjoyable visit. We usually rent a car and take short trips. Among the many trips two places we visited were extremely interesting and both are within a 30 minute drive from my wife's home; i.e., "The Abbey of Our Lady of Fontgombault" (a Benedictine abbey of the Solesmes congregation--the official maintainers/producers of Gregorian Chant for Catholic Church) and the Chateau de Valencay--the beautiful castle whose most famous owner was Prince Talleyrand.

We had a surprising and pleasant experience. We attended Mass at two different Church's. The first Sunday in France at my wife's old village church--St. Maur, France. There was a special festival going on and surprisingly the little church was filled. More surprisingly the next two Sundays we attended Mass at a large church
in the neighboring town of Chateauroux, France--once again this large church was full. We found this as an extremely hopeful sign. The part of France my wife is from was a hotbed during the war of religion and is extremely anti-clerical--as matter of fact the mayor of Chateauroux in the 1960s was a communist. In the past when we attended Mass in my wife's region there would be very few people attending and mostly older women. Those attending Mass this past summer were of all ages, men and women, families with young children and most surprisingly even small groups of young men in their late teens early twenties. (I have to admit that over the past few years we've noticed more and more people attending Mass.) What can I account this to? I can't say for sure--but more and more Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament is being practiced; even my wife's little village church which is more like a mission church has Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament once a week.

Till next time--Praise The Lord!

Paul

Opus Dei #4

For those of you who have read my previous blogs you'll quickly note that I've been participating in the monthly 3rd Saturday Opus Dei "Morning of Recollections" sporadically for nearly two years. Though I believe I am not called to be an Opus Dei member--numerary nor super numerary, I believe the movement is beneficial to my spiritual development and I plan to continue to support the movement as a cooperator.

I find the emphasis of the movement of encouraging people to recognize what our daily activities potentially afford when accomplished to the best of our ability for God and our neighbor, and of being a consistent Christian throughout each day, regardless of the environment a great aid on my journey of life.

The meditations and examination of consciences offered at the Morning of Recollections are consistently provocative in the positive sense. Last Saturday for example one meditation provided by the priest dealt with "formation". What he reflected on was that the three years Jesus of public life not only showed who Jesus was, provided a platform for Him to preach, perform miracles and complete His mission salvation; it was also a period of formation for the apostles under His tutelage who followed Him. And even after three years of formation under this tutelage, the Gospel illustrates how they continued to falter. This is encouraging to us, that as we are being formed (transformed) we should never give up and if we do, like the apostles we too will succeed in "winning the race".

The meditation by the lay speaker dealt with the virtue of "fortitude" and the difficulty many of us have with this virtue. How many of us remain faithful to our principles when obstacles arise?

In a word after each of these Mornings of Recollection, I am inspired and drawn closer to the Lord, endeavoring to follow Him along the road He wants.

As an aside--two things. What is also inspiring to me is to be in the midst of 75 or so men, the majority between the ages of 25 and 55 years who are striving to be filled/transformed by our Lord. One other thing, I suggest that anyone who believes they may be interested in getting involved with Opus Dei that they read about the movement. I suggest a person read BOTH critical and favorable articles and books on Opus Dei and pray for the guidance of Holy Spirit.