Catching Up

February 15, 2022

It’s been quite awhile since we’ve been in touch! After a year or so of rebuilding this website onto a more user-friendly platform for us non-professional web-techs, we’re finally at a point to catch up on some overdue blog posts!

Christmas 2021

The last time we touched base with you we were preparing for the Christmas Novena (2021), so we’ll start now by sharing a Christmas slideshow with you.

Christmas is everywhere you turn in the monastery–not until Christmas Eve, though. We try to hold off on decorating for as long as possible in order to keep Advent to its fullest. Usually we start decorating the monastery about three or four days before Christmas.

In this video we hope to share with you a taste of what this time of year is like for us here in Carmel (you can also find this video on our YouTube channel). We hope you enjoy it!

New Courtyard Pavement

Soon after Christmastide (no matter the weather!) a couple of the sisters began working to complete an extension of cobblestone walkway in our préau (for those of you who haven’t learned yet, that is the French word for “courtyard”). Here is a video and some pictures:

Visit From the NET Team

In January we were blessed to get a phone call from NET Ministries Team 5 supervisor requesting overnight housing and meals for the team as they traveled through to Louisiana. For those of you not familiar with NET Ministries check it out and see what tremendous things God is doing for Catholic youth through these fervent college-aged Catholic missionaries.

Some wonderful “parishioners” (since we’re not a parish, let’s say “daily mass goers” to our chapel) were gracious enough to provide for their overnight stay, and we were blessed to have a visit with the team of 4 guys and 7 young ladies in our speak room. By their authentic love for our Lord and his Church their personal witness–along with lots of fun and humor–makes it hard for the young people (and everyone) to resist wanting what they have! And they freely give it. Their desire is to give and share what they have personally received from Christ. Let us pray for them!

Puppies

Yep, our two puppies we got last year are still puppies, although a little bigger. They still chew strange objects and make a mess with whatever they can find in the yard to mess up, but that, too, is improving. Toby and Sadie are turning out to be great watch dogs. They also have given Paolo back some of his youth. Paolo is now about 14 years old and the two little ones love to kiss his face and try to get him to play a little. They seem to love him and Paolo sometimes gives in, other times has to keep his turf secure and show who’s the real boss. We’ve started to call Paolo “Grampa” or “Gramps”. You may recall from our Bulletin from a year ago that his life-long partner Gracie finally died. We think Paolo is too busy now to miss Gracie too much.

Oh. Yes. By the way, the sisters are okay with the new dogs, too.