Sunday morning coming down.🙏🏻🌸

Sunday morning in our family home forever etched in my deepest heart. Dad awake bright and early, preparing our genial pony Nellie to ferry us to Holy Mass in the little country Church five miles away. Mom too, preparing breakfast. Us children, super excited, donning our specially reserved Sunday best. Party atmosphere for sure 🎉 

Ours a humble cart, affluent neighbours travelling by horse and trap. They sure did seem a lot more upmarket than we were, comfier too possessing colourful snug rugs, while we rested on old coats. However, I do not recall ever feeling envious or disgruntled with our lot. We were appreciators not critics, as Sister Wendy declared, when she was being denigrated by the ‘real’ art critics.

Journey home, relaxed affair, Dad smoking his first cigarette of the day. He would never ever smoke a cigarette before he received Jesus in the most Holy Eucharist. Loyal Nellie meandering along, sedately, slowly, as we children sang all the way. Luminescence and sublimity in the ordinary.🎆

What a wondrous legacy bequeathed to us by our dear parents. They handed on the luminous light of Faith in simplicity and loving kindness, weaving it beautifully into our lives in gentle fashion. We owe them a colossal debt of gratitude.

Many years later, my little granddaughter Saoirse, gazing on this precious photograph, uttered; ‘Nan, you are in a Carriage’. Mom and Dad, smiling in Heaven, agreed wholeheartedly - Yes, to all and sundry it may have resembled a humble cart but to all of us, it was and forever shall be a Carriage. From the mouths of babes🌸

‘Real goodness is always simple. Simplicity is so attractive and so profitable, that it is strange that so few people are really simple’. (Leo Tolstoy).

‘Godliness with contentment is great gain, for we brought nothing into the world, and we cannot take anything out of the world’. (1Timothy 6:6-7)

Today, 21/3/2023, St. Anne’s Holy Rosary. Mrs.O Brien, deep in Alzheimer’s (neighbour from our childhood) began singing a song: ‘Her eyes they shone like diamonds’ before declaring: ‘Pony and cart!! And you all sang all the time. We could hear you coming afar off’. 

Singular moment of sublime grace from God. What joy☀️🙏🏻

Sacred space.🌸

‘It is always springtime in the heart that loves God’. (St. John Vianney)

Rosie replete with the fullness of life, self sufficient, as she sleeps soundly in her cozy chair. It seems such a paradox -  How could Rosie be self sufficient and yet so helpless?  Life is a circle and when one lives life as Rosie has done, there’s a sense of completion and fulfilment. The harvest is gathered in, the story told. Now her time of peace and fulfilment, autumn’s golden days. We glorify God by accomplishing the work He has given us to do and Rosie has done just that. 

Holy Rosary begins, the Day-Room comes to life. I am humbled constantly with the response from my beautiful folk, to the unaware eye they are all sleeping soundly but once we begin everyone is singing.

Rosie calls out her decade, animated and happy. This hour of prayer and song will keep her with us for a time and when it is over, she will return to her safe haven in her heart. As Thomas Merton wrote: ‘Now I am grown up and have time for nothing but the essentials’.

To be in this Sacred Space is a little piece of Heaven, in my wildest dreams I could not have imagined my life journey would lead me here. Stumbling upon wonder is walking with Christ.

‘Always be close to Jesus, that’s my life plan’. (Saint Carlo Acutis)

One time when I realised I had abandoned some object yet again and was looking everywhere for it, I complained to Rosie: ‘I am such a clown Rosie’. She replied gently: ‘Oh no dear, don’t talk about yourself in that fashion. Others will be more than happy to do it for you’.

Sage words I pass on to many💎. Only this morning, I complimented a lady on how well she was looking. Her reply: ‘I have gained weight’. Prime opportunity to offer Rosie’s wonderful wisdom. The lady smiled, appreciating every wise word.☀️