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Newsletter December 2010

227 with car  

Could it be December 2010?  One decade of the millennium done…
More to come

Snow came early and with it icy weather for 10 days.  On top of the mandate to us to stop work, the weather froze us into immobility.  But our prayer life is like it has never been before.  We have breakfast and prayer together at 9 a.m.  On Mondays and Wednesdays, other people come at 7 a.m. for morning prayer using a Celtic prayerbook, the Catholic prayerbook, or lectio divina, and at 5 p.m. on Wednesdays for an hour of quiet meditation.  We are considering going to a monastery for a day or two to participate in the rhythm of the monastic life where one practices silence and prays more and with as much intention as one eats.  Our Protestant resistance to rote spiritual practice has diminished devotion to spiritual discipline.  This is harder for Marda than Ward.

Ward’s Christmas poem here is perfected and he did a very nice job bringing it to the worship time at Ballysillan Presbyterian Church on December 12th.  We hope Aubrey recorded it as the delivery was brilliant. Watch the quonstothers website as we will post it there if available.

We missed the cut-off for mailing packages back to the States.  We are coming past the deadline for mailing cards.  Suffice to say we are frozen into slow motion.  Christmas has

snuck up on us this year.  Tree is up but ornaments are half fired waiting for the tutor to get the kiln fired up.  No traybakes this year but we had Christmas pudding and poppers, and we are going to go to see “The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” with our new friends, Harry and Dorothy Smith, as a Christmas treat.  It seems reasonable to wrap up our year of exploration of C.S. Lewis and his Belfast connection, to be seeing this movie from the “Chronicles of Narnia”.

After 2 ½ years of being immersed in the Protestant unionist and loyalist culture we are finally meeting more Catholics.  The only “outsider” (outside of the charter members of The Loom) to come to our 7 a.m. prayer time is a Jesuit priest.  Vicki, a colleague of my sister, from Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles, herself a Missouri Synod Lutheran converted to Catholicism came to meet us, said she knew this priest who prays with us, and then a local Catholic bishop came to the house to meet with Maria and was later meeting with Vicki.  One purpose of The Loom is to weave relationships.  This is happening!

Email: wardstothers@cten.org
Phone: (028) 90 291986  From U.S. 01144.2890.291986

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