With these tender and stirring words from our good God, we begin another Lent, dear Friends of Carmel ~

One of the best ways to assist you in your efforts this Lent is through spiritual reading—useful, edifying, regular reading. A few of our new titles, pictured below, were chosen with this particularly in mind. Other books specifically about the Passion of Our Lord are The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ, What Jesus Saw From the Cross, and On the Passion of Christ – According to the Four Evangelists. Visit the section of books on the Spiritual Life, where you will find many profound and practical guides for this soul-retreat time, especially Spiritual Combat, Why Must I Suffer – a Book of Light and Consolation, My Imitation of Christ, and numerous others. Reading the Holy Gospels is, of course, an excellent way to spend the time of Lent. A wonderful way to fill with spiritual benefit your time driving to and from work and school, is to download the Audio Gospels, recently released by the Seraphim Company.

All the Sisters have had colds this winter. But as we understand it, nearly everyone has been sick this winter! But we are all pretty well mended now and ready for the rigors, as well as the joys, of a Carmelite Lent. We have also been working our way through repairing a small mountain of very old vestments. This intricate work is most painstaking, but so very interesting. The clever ingenuity of our expert seamstress Sisters discovers a way to “heal” the vestment for another few years of wear. Sometimes we find beneath the vestment linings notes written by the makers of these vestments, often by communities of nuns. The notes record the date of its completion and where it was made: precious relics of another age—an age of faith and matchless devotion! Recently, we opened the lining of an old chasuble to find the page of a French calendar from the 1890s!