"He to whom the eternal Word speaketh is delivered from a multitude of opinions."

-- The Imitation of Christ

Back Home Again

Well, I'm home. Sort of. I'm staying with my brother in NoVa while my trailer undergoes repairs at the dealer in Pennsylvania. And looking for a new place to live. I've actually made an offer on a place over on the other side of the Blue Ridge, near Shenandoah and Luray. I think it will be good for me to be away from Charlottesville. There's a Latin Mass Catholic church up in Front Royal, and a traditional Anglican one down in Waynesboro which belongs to the same denomination as the one I attended in Tucson while waiting out the winter in Arizona, so I can go to mass and not have to worry about the issues at the ones in Charlottesville. Also I'd be right between the Shenandoah Forest and River, so lots of things to do.

It's been a good trip, overall. I've seen many things: Niagara, the Great Lakes, Route 66, Tallgrass Prairie Preserve, Palo Duro Canyon, the Painted Desert, the Petrified Forest, the Mojave Desert, Yosemite, Mt. Shasta, Yellowstone, the Great Salt Lake and the Salt Flats, Boston, New York, Chicago, L.A., Toronto, and all the stuff in-between. Experienced sweet love, made some new friends, saw some old ones, had a long talk with John Michael Talbot. But the main thing is, and always was, that I went in search of encounters with God, and I found them. I'm not totally healed yet--I didn't get that big miracle which I'd hoped for, but I did get miracles, encounters, and answered prayers, and continue to. But I am glad to be home. It's time to be still for a while, to have a real house to live in again, to have some stability. It's turned out to be a particularly challenging time to be out there blowing in the wind. Also, as beautiful as so many places I've seen are, I don't think any of them are more beautiful than Shenandoah.

"There are persons advanced in the ways of God, who are, as the result of an illness, inclined to exceptional irritability. They are like people badly dressed, because their illness increases, as it were tenfold, the painful impression produced by contradictions, and sometimes the latter are incessant. There may be great merit in this struggle, and great patience in seeming impatience."

Fr. Reginald Garrigou-LaGrange, The Three Ages of the Interior Life