From the Cave..... our Newsletter

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From the Cave

Our Quarterly Newsletter: Spring, 2025

Spring is finally arriving here in the North Carolina Piedmont. It has been a long and very cold Winter for us here. The mornings are still cool to cold but the afternoons now are warm and pleasant.

We are in the third week of Lent now. Tomorrow is the Feast of the Annunciation. We will be having Mass to celebrate the day. That will be a break from the “purple” days.

In all the hustle and bustle of life it is a relief to sit back and reflect on the Lenten journey, to reflect on our individual lives in relation to the Christian journey. Lent does give us all the opportunity to reflect on our shortcomings and to form a new relationship with God. St. Benedict once remarked we all should live all our days as if we were in Lent.

As we grow older it seems time flies, the days go by in a blurr 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. That is why it is so important for all of us to take this time given us to stop, assess where we are on our journey and to make amends for our failures.

The seasons come and they go, and 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. Even so, the world still intrudes with each day bringing a new and often disturbing event.

This year in particular has brought much sudden change and situations in our own country but also in the context of our national relations with so much of the rest of the world particularly with our next-door neighbor, Canada as well as with Mexico and Greenland.

Where is peace? There does not appear to be any peace anywhere, in our nation or anywhere else in the world.

Why? All we have to do is read the Old Testament readings now in Lent from the prophet Jeremiah. All we have to do is read them to see the absence of God in the world.

Today, let us all resolve, as Christians, to overcome the evil of this secular world.

We pray each day for peace.

 +Peter COS