Thank you for your card and letter with its remark on Monastic Tradition.
Agriculture: helping to forge a strong interior personality.. to witness and accomplish good, even at a cost..It is also good to promote manual labour and to promote an agriculture that is first of all at the service of the inhabitants. (HH Pope Benedict XVI addressing Ambassadors May 5, 2012, Vatican News)
The association of Monasticism and Agriculture has endowed European Culture with a special patrimony. My new circumstances on a family dairy farm in West Sussex, England have encouraged my thinking about this cultural patrimony.
Steering through the settings and rhythms of my day, I enjoy manual agricultural labour - The Liturgy of the Hours, study, reading, personal space, silence, pleasure, social encounter with the farming family, growth.
Saint Augustine richly depicts: Duas vitas..una in opere actionis, altera in mercede contemplationis.. (LH II:784) Two kinds of life..one is active involving labor, the other contemplative, the reward of labor. (LH II 947, 948 ICEL).
Qualities for a man to aspire to, most so, in self-presentation, can be gleaned from Saint Basil the Great, in a seasonal lection, as he writes: simplex in essentia, varius inpotentiis. (LH II:806) Natural in essence, versatile in accomplishment.
Musically expressed in M. Charles Tournemire's commentary on the Whitsun Liturgical Hymn Veni Creator (L'orgue Mystique), in monumental art of the Parisian Organists' improvisation, and recalling, for me, my Saint Dominic's years.
Your late father was a great commentator on liturgical prayer. In his craft, he prayed with his hands, as all his liturgical iron work bear testimony in Saint Dominic's.
This weekend, in Milan, HH Pope Benedict XVI at the Media Hora shared in his homily:
The theme of a recent World Communications' Day was Silence and Word (HH Pope Benedict XVI, Vatican News)
Musically expressed in M. Charles Tournemire's commentary on the Whitsun Liturgical Hymn Veni Creator (L'orgue Mystique), in monumental art of the Parisian Organists' improvisation, and recalling, for me, my Saint Dominic's years.
This weekend, in Milan, HH Pope Benedict XVI at the Media Hora shared in his homily:
Le nostre labbra, i nostri cuori
e le nostre menti, nella preghiera
ecclesiale, si fanno interpreti
delle necessità e degli aneliti
dell'intera umanità.
Lips, hearts, minds are,
in the Divine Office,
interpreters of needs
and aspirations..
..Helping to forge a strong
interior personality.. to witness
and accomplish good, even at
a cost. HH Pope Benedict XVI
Acknowledgements
Liturgia Horarum and ICEL Texts
Vatican Radio News and Broadcasts
Santa Sede Documents
The Family who have afforded me my Agricultural encounter
My Photographs with Fuji Finepix X 100
My watercolour
Cordially, ΨΔ
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