Getting ready to go

It has been an intensely busy summer, and today , with the weather in Boston already hinting at Autumn, I have only four days left before departing for Rome for a biblical 40 days. My work there will be to serve as one of two English language interpreters (Sr Julia is the other) for a month-long international meeting of the Daughters of St Paul. Superiors and elected delegates from every part of the world will come together to elect our new Superior General and her council, and to establish the priority areas for our life and mission for the next six years. When I was first asked to perform this service, I reminded the provincial that while I can translate from Italian into English pretty well in real time, my spoken Italian is execrable. Functional, but "cave man Italian" nonetheless. I was still asked to go. (Good for humility!)

Packing has been going on a little bit at a time since I got back from my annual retreat. That is because I have also been involved full-time in the music apostolate during that same time. We learned and recorded several songs for a new Christmas concert CD and are now preparing for the concert itself, doing a kind of rough outline of the program and staging. Trying to follow Sr Nancy and Sr Tracey as they describe the pattern of steps and hand motions is good for warding off dementia, they tell me. It is certainly good for humility!

I also started facial neuromuscular retraining in mid-July, to try to gain more control of the left side of my face after an attack of shingles left the nerves to regrow in a weird tangle that is good for...humility. (Are you beginning to sense a pattern here? Because I sure am!!!)

Anyway, one thing for you to look for on the new Christmas CD is a song that will be "premiered" at our concerts.  Listen along with the sisters in the control room to one of the "takes" of a piece of this new song. (This is a very rough recording! It took us a while to get this very lovely song right.)

 

Mary Had a Son was written by Randy Cox, the music director who first heard our music playing in the gift shop at Gethesemane Abbey. He felt inspired to ask if there was a way he could work with us, just as we were praying for someone who could help us bring our music to a new level. Randy has helped us connect with a phenomenal arranger who has crafted settings made for our voices (not just generic "women's voices," but our own, having listened to our recordings to get a sense of our range and style). This has made it so much easier for us to sing, and made recording faster, too! Anyway, this beautiful new Christmas meditation which will be inaugurated this season was written by Randy Cox with music by Phillip Keveren, and is dedicated to the Daughters of St Paul. We think that is a first, too.

Speaking of firsts, this year we will offer our first-ever concert in Orange County, CA and our first concert in Mascoutah, IL (Belleville diocese, within driving distance of much of Illinois and Indiana).

Please look at the concert venues and dates and see if there's a way you can make a family event out of one of our Pauline Christmas concerts this year!

I hope to have a moment or two while in Italy to update you on things and share a few pictures... Two of us have permission for a quick trip to Florence (we'll be accompanied by an American sister who is stationed in Rome, and with whom I shared a year of novitiate). Then, after the mid-point of the meeting, we are promised a kind of field trip to a to-be-announced Marian shrine. (I'm hoping it will be a new-to-me shrine of the Blessed Mother!)

And speaking of Our Lady, today we welcomed the Pilgrim Virgin, not of Fatima, but of Aparecida (the Patroness of Brazil). This tiny statue (about 20" high) is a replica of the one in the national shrine, and usually visits the parishes of Brazil. She is truly a pilgrim, because some of those parishes are quite remote. Even now when she goes home to visit (every other year) it takes our Sister Liria three days to get to her parents' house from the nearest city. (She grew up without Sunday Mass: a priest would make the rounds of the villages, coming to her farming community every two months or so. The leading families would simply take turns hosting prayers on Sunday so that the Lord's Day was duly observed and his Word received with reverence.)

Anyway, for the next two months, Our Lady of Aparecida will be visiting the Brazilian immigrants in North America, a good many of whom are in New England, and she started her visit in our home!