Let's put a spin on this! What I find intriguing is that there were nuns
before there were monks, virgins and widows of the Church at its beginning.
That Antony the first Hermit (though Paul, in Jerome's leg-pull, precedes
him), first put his sister into an already-established convent. And that
Augustine wrote Letter 211 that became the Augustinian Rule to his sister's
convent, i.e. for nuns, rather than monks. And another spin, the ways in
which each new Order liked to create the fiction that it preceded all the
others, The 'Augustinians' used Augustine's Letter to claim they antedated
Benedict, and the 'Carmelites' dated themselves back into the Hebrew
Scriptures' Elijah and Elisha! It is all coming rather full circle, for we
had a Mass commemorating St Therese of Lisieux, now Doctor of the Church, at
the Australian Carmel outside Florence, and I looked at its fragmentary
Quattrocento frescoes to realise they were scenes of Haifa, as backdrop to
Elisha's miracles, the sweep of the Mediterranean at our feet as viewed from
Mount Carmel. Meanwhile I am finding it architecturally odd working at La
Certosa amidst its laura/cloister architecture which does not belong to the
Cistercians who have now taken it over from the Carthusians. But in
monasticism time stops, becoming eternity, yet the Offices run like
clockwork ;-).
____
Julia Bolton Holloway, Hermit of the Holy Family
via del Partigiano 16, Montebeni, 50014 FIESOLE, ITALY
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http://members.aol.com/juliansite/Juliansite.htm
He said not, 'Thou shalt not be tempested, thou shalt not be travailed, thou
shalt not be diseased.' But he said, 'Thou shalt not be overcome'.
Julian of Norwich, Showings, Sloane Manuscript, fol. 49.
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