From the Cave..... our Newsletter

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From the Cave

Our Quarterly Newsletter: Summer, 2025

It has been a particularly hot and wet summer here at the Hermitage. As I begin to write this newsletter it is raining again, a hard tropical deluge.

We are in the middle of July now and well into Trinity Season, the long green season that our Roman brothers and sisters call the Ordinary Season. I have always thought that was a most apropriate name since it is the time when we all walk the day to day of life as an ordinary Christian. There are no mountains like Christmas or Easter to climb and we have passed through the valley of Lent. Advent awaits us but meanwhile we live life day-by-day, month-by-month until then.

This may sound rather boring to some who may be sitting on the outside of a religious life but there is within all of us a certain tension, an awareness that, as Saint Peter expressed it, that the devil “as a roaring lion” is waiting for someone to devoir.

Each new day brings another news item that is disturbing. The conflict in Gaza continues without, seemingly, any solution to the situation. There was the short war between Israel and Iran that could have been even a worse situation. Our local news each day invades our quiet life with and never-ending reporting of shooting and other violence in our local streets. And we ask ourselves, “Where is God in all this?”

The most recent and disturbing news is the terrible flood in the hill country of Texas where so many people were killed including so many promising young girls at a summer camp. And again, we ask ourselves, “Where is God in all this?”

I wish there was an answer. I know within my heart God is always present. God is present in the bad times as well as the good times. God is present within each of us whether we recognize that or not. God is there to be a strong rock against the bad times, to be a comfort in the old sense of the word, strength, as well as the new meaning of warm and fuzzy. 

As I wrote last time, as we grow older it seems time flies, the days go by in a blur and the years seem to go around in just a few weeks. Our individual trips around the sun on this fragile planet are over, it appears in just a few weeks.  Life goes on here at the Hermitage just as it does everywhere. Our daily routine of prayer each day and Mass on Sundays, Wednesdays and Major Holy Days, gives us a sense of continuity and peace as compared to the outside world

We pray each day for peace. 

 +Peter COS