God is a Pillow.

A long time ago, as a young man, I spent some years working on oil tankers in the merchant marine. It was a crude existence, a rough adventure which, unless for somewhat dire financial reasons, only fools and hopeless romantics dare to embark on. But looking back I realize that those years and those experiences shaped my life in so many ways that even now, decades later, I still find myself surprised at how much that period of my life helped to form my own view of the world and its reality, of God and His power, and of my own inner workings and strengths.
I think seafaring is in some sense very much like mountaineering, or even farming, One is exposed to the beauty and majesty of nature which, though challenging, is also addictive and formative of character. One falls in love with the sea, with the mountains, or with the land, perhaps subconsciously, and  in spite of oneself. The saying is true that it takes a few years to put the sea in a man's blood, but it takes a lifetime to take it out.
Any good seaman will tell you that the sea must be navigated with prudence and respect, for in its power it can be a merciless and sometimes lethal enemy. The skill of a good captain is to let his ship be like a pillow, bending, twisting, and giving in to the forces of nature which, if resisted, will crush everything in their path. It is an art to sail a seagoing vessel safely through treacherous wind and waves, to help it gracefully peak and ebb with the raging surface of a storm powered sea. The ship, and her crew's safety, depends on her ability and willingness to be flexible and to adapt, to lose many battles in the hope of winning the war and making it back safely into port.
God so does with us, He is patient and flexible like a pillow, He allows us to impose our stubborn wills, He is willing to lose many battles with us hoping that one day He would win the war for our hearts. We know that He manages to win some wars but that He also loses some, Sadly hell speaks so eloquently to that fact, but in the end it is always our choice.
And we, like the Psalmist, ought to be grateful for God's great and infinite mercy towards us, "If You, Lord should mark our guilt, who would survive?" (Psalm 130). He does not behave like a wall with us, rigid and unbending, if He did He would crush us in a minute, we would not survive. But He is like a pillow, one can bump against a pillow and not get hurt, because it constantly gives in by changing its shape according to the forces imposed on it. I think the image of a pillow is a good image for God, if we only realize what this means. That this awesome and powerful God who "made the sea, it belongs to Him, the dry land too for it was formed by His hands." (Psalm 95.) is willing to bend His will and stoop down to this lowly creature who is man. St.Paul expresses this reality so beautifully in his letter to the Ephesians, "God, who is rich in mercy, out of the great love He has for us, even when we were dead through our sins, brought us alive together with Christ." (Eph. 2:4) We cannot even begin to imagine how much He loves us.
And where does this leave us? Love can only be repaid by love. We ought to respond with heartfelt gratitude by reciprocating His love with our love for Him and for our neighbour. And we too ought to be like pillows with those who oppose us, for so does He do with us.

Let Me Suffer.

Those who work in prison ministry can surely understand the anguish of people caught in the iron grip of the justice system, and the anguish of their families. A beloved son convicted of a serious crime and condemned to life in a penal institution, or even worse, to death, leaves a parent hopelessly heartbroken. Watching the child he or she raised, and loved, and hoped for,and dreamed for, now destined to a life of suffering and shame, to a life of unreached potential and broken dreams. No wonder Our Lord included prison ministry as an act of mercy, "I was in prison and you visited me."( Mt. 25: 36.). He should know, for God has long suffered the anguish and the pain of a convict's parent.
Imagine the day of the Fall, long ago, God, who in His infinite kindness, had set His hopes on our first parents, had given them everything, and allowed them to live in His Presence. He kept them from death, "for God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the death of the living." (Wisdom 1:13).  He gave them dominion over all creation, He gave them free will, it was a gamble for Him, but He knew that love demands freedom, and that the first ingredient of a successful relationship is mutual consent. He wanted them to consent to His love by the way they lived in obedience to His command. "If you love Me you will obey my commandments." (John 14:15).
Jesus said to His disciples, whoever has seen me has seen the Father also. John the evangelist writes what is perhaps the most beautiful verse in Scripture, and all literature, "Jesus began to weep." ( John 11:35). Imagine the God of the universe, the God who has no beginning nor end, and who is all powerful and omnipotent, weeping, If we see Jesus the Son, weeping, then we see also the Father weeping for us. This verse of the Gospel of John is a window into God's heart, tender and loving, and in pain. Who can read those beautiful texts in the books of the prophets Jeremiah and Hosea and not share in God's anguish and pain? Jeremiah prays to God saying, Lord because of Your forbearance do not take me away, (Jer 15:15). Some translations write, "Because of Your long-suffering"  And Hosea quotes God saying;  "My heart recoils within me , my compassion grows warm and tender.( Hosea 11:18). Here we have Scripture's own testimony that God has long suffered and that His heart recoils with pain and compassion. This is something that those who are close to God do not overlook. St. Padre Pio says that we must hide our tears from Him who shed tears for us and continues to shed them because of our ingratitude. And sharing His pain is the task of those who love Him. Like the Son and His Mother who suffered so much for the Father and for us all.
In the book of Genesis we see how God answers the question to His question to Cain, "Where is your brother Abel?" and Cain answers shamefully, " Am I my brother's keeper?" (Gen. 4:9). God answers Cain's question with silence He does not answer with words but with action, by sending His only Son to suffer and die for our sins.
This is how God gives suffering a redemptive meaning, united with the suffering of His Son, our suffering is not just meaningless pain that destroys man's spirit, but a gift that ennobles and glorifies him because he is sharing in the loving mission of God.
In our vocation as Secular Carmelites we share in the mission of the Order which St. Therese so beautifully expresses in her book "The Story of a Soul."  "I stated what I had come to do in Carmel, I have come to save souls, and most of all to pray for priests." In other words I have come to share Your anguish Lord, I have come to share Your pain. To suffer with You and  for the sake of my brothers. It is a great mission.  Our Holy Mother Teresa of Jesus wrote in her "Interior Castle." That it is a great alms to pray for those who are in mortal sin.
Great is that day in our spiritual life, when we can say with joy, Good God, let me suffer with You. It is not necessarily to ask for suffering but to accept joyfully whatever comes. It is our prison ministry.

LET ME SUFFER.

Let me suffer in silence my God,

for You and for the sake of my brother.

For in anguish and pain

since the day of the Fall long ago,

You bear in Your Heart our disdain.

Let me suffer in silence my God,

with You on the cross.

You gambled with us,

You gave us free will, and You lost.

But You gather jewels of love

from the dust.

Let me carry Your cross,

as also I must.

Let me suffer in silence with You.

That not One be forbearing, but two

Let me share in Your hurt,

all my days on this earth.

Till the day You have planned,

till we all understand,

You are Love.

The Tomb, the Workshop of God..

Burial is a distinct sign of the presence of humans, for only humans bury their own.
It is amazing how the experiences we have in our childhood lie simmering gently in our heads until one day, years later, everything crystallizes nicely and we make sense of many things we could not understand before.
Keeping watch in prayer we can also discern God's loving hand throughout this growth process, and we may eventually come to somewhat comprehend why God led us through that specific path.
Some of my strongest childhood memories belong to a period in my life when as a young altar boy of nine or ten, my mother used to send me out to assist in almost every funeral celebrated in our parish. Celebrated is hardly the proper word, especially for a child, for those events had a macabre and melancholic odor about them that I was particularly sensitive to.
In those days people who died in their homes were kept there, generally overnight, until on the following day the priest, as minister of the Church, and some altar boys representing the faithful, would walk from the church to the afflicted home, and after a brief ritual of blessing and prayer, all would process slowly, bringing the dead to the church for the funeral Mass amid the mournful tolling of bells.The Mass was in Latin, and hardly comprehensible to a young boy. But even then the sense of the Divine was not lost on me.
After the liturgy we would then accompany the coffin to the horse-drawn hearse waiting outside. The elaborate woodwork gilded with gold and powered by two enormous Clydesdale type horses, snorting and fidgeting as they patiently waited to begin their trek to the cemetery. Behind the hearse, a horse-drawn black coach with leather seats which carried the priest and two altar boys as they accompanied the dead on the final journey. I remember those clipclopping trips that slowly made their way to the huge cemetery forty five minutes away. Then came the business of reaching the grave site, navigating steps and narrow pathways amid the countless statues, marble slabs and portraits that marked the graves. There the burial ceremony immediately took place accompanied by sobs, and silence, and  the occasional wailing of relatives. And I would watch the whole process quietly, mentally storing the experience for retrieval  and discernment in some distant future day.
I write all this because years later I came to realize the value and the beauty of funerals. God, the Great Psychologist, willed, that though the soul left the body at the moment of death, He would still be present even in those remains through His Divine immanence. He is present in all creation and in the living organisms that would eventually help the body to return to dust from which it came.
Here we see the love and kindness of God who allowed for a period of mourning and closure for those left behind. Furthermore and most importantly, in His infinite wisdom He provided for the future fulfillment of Scripture as St. Paul tells us. "for I handed on to you, as of first importance, what I in turn had received. That Christ died for our sins in accordance with the Scriptures, that He was buried and on the third day He rose again in according with the Scriptures." 1 Cor. 15: 3-4)
God provided for the future burial and resurrection of His Son to give us victory over death. The damage done in the Garden was repaired in the Tomb.

St. Faustina's Vision of Hell.

 



Without a doubt, one of the greatest spiritual books that came out of the twentieth century is the Diary of St. Maria Faustina Kowalska, "Divine Mercy in My Soul". Faustina was born in Poland on August 25 1905, and died on October 5 1938, she was 33 years old at the time of her death. In 1925 she joined the Congregation of the Sisters of Mercy in Warsaw, and in February 1931 Jesus began to reveal to her His plans to make her His "Secretary of Divine Mercy". She was to be the instrument through which is spread devotion to His Divine Mercy and "You will prepare the world for My final coming" (429) This book is a treasure of mystical experiences, and in it is found the great goodness of God who reveals the depths of His Mercy. "It is a sign of the End Times. After it will come the Day of Justice." (848). Jesus tells Faustina that " In the Old Covenant I sent prophets wielding thunderbolts to My people. Today I am sending you with My Mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to My Merciful Heart. I use punishment when they themselves force me to do so; My hand is reluctant to take hold of the sword of justice. Before the Day of Justice, I am sending the Day of Mercy." (1588) God who loves us warns us and offers us all  the means to return to Him so that He does not have to punish us, "for God did not make death, nor does He rejoice in the death of the living." (Wis. 1:13)

In His Mercy, one day, Jesus showed Faustina a vision of hell so she could tell the people of world to turn to the Mercy of God, so as to avoid going there.

Here is St. Faustina's own testimony.

"Today, I was led by an angel to the Chasms of Hell. It is a place of great torture; how awesomely large and extensive it is! The kinds of tortures I saw:

The First Torture that constitutes hell is:
    The loss of God
The Second is

     Perpetual remorse of conscience.
The Third is
     That one's condition will never change.
The Fourth is
     The fire that will penetrate the soul without destroying it. A terrible suffering since it is a purely spiritual fire, lit by God's anger.

The Fifth is

     Continual darkness and a terrible suffocating smell, and despite the darkness, the devils and the souls of the damned see each other and all the evil, both of others and their own.
The Sixth is
The constant company of Satan.
The Seventh is
Horrible despair, hatred of God, vile words, curses and blasphemies.
These are the tortures suffered by all the damned together, but that is not the end of the suffering There are special tortures destined for particular souls. These are the torments of the senses. Each soul undergoes terrible and indescribable sufferings related to the manner in which it has sinned.
There are caverns and pits of torture where one form of agony differs from another. I would have died at the very sight of these tortures if the omnipotence of God had not supported me.

Let the sinner know that he will be tortured throughout all eternity, in those senses which he made use of to sin. I am writing this at the command of God, so that no soul may find an excuse by saying there is no hell, or that nobody has ever been there, and so no one can say what it is like.

 "I, Sister Faustina Kowalska, by the order of God, have visited the Abysses of Hell so that I might tell souls about it and testify to its existence.I cannot speak about it now; but I have received a command from God to leave it in writing. The devils were full of hatred for me, but they had to obey me at the command of God, What I have written is but a pale shadow of the things I saw. But I noticed one thing: That most of the souls there are those who disbelieved that there is a hell.When I came to, I could hardly recover from the fright .how terribly souls suffer there! Consequently, I pray even more fervently for the conversion of sinners. I incessantly plead God's mercy upon them. O My Jesus, I would rather be in agony until the end of the world, amidst the greatest sufferings, than offend you by the least sin." (Diary 741)

God's Ambition.

The Bible has often been called a love letter from God.

I want to start today's blog with a poem I wrote some time ago. It is called, "The Love that loved me."


                                                              

If I knew of God and

never tried to seek Him.

If I heard Him call,

and simply carried on.

If I broke His laws,

though written all around me.

And in my troubles

I merely soldiered on.

If in my heart I

stubbornly refused Him,

relying on my strength,

and went about my ways.

Then, I have failed to love

the Love that loved me.

Then, all I ever did I did in vain,

and squandered all my days,



One day someone tried to lay a snare for our Lord and asked him, "Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest? He said to them, You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the greatest and the first commandment."  (Matthew 22:36-37)

Those of us who remember learning catechism as children, may remember the first, or one of the first questions we were asked and were made to remember by heart. Who created you? God created me. Why did God create you? God created me to love Him and serve Him in this world, and to be with Him forever in the next.

Very simple questions with profound answers that ought to give us all a strong sense of purpose for living our finite number of days on this earth. Yet very often the noises and the passing attractions of the world distract us and leave us lost in an aimless fog that slowly but surely separates us from the real reason for being put here in the first place.

Perhaps in the last two thousand years there has never been a generation of Christians so educated and knowledgeable in the ways of the world, and yet so unlearned and infantile in the ways of God. We have collectively lost our sense of direction, and are wondering aimlessly, dazzled by our endless pursuit of earthly happiness which leaves us empty and spiritually poor.

One of the primary reasons we do not seek to love God with all our hearts is that we simply do not know that God desires union with us. God is so madly in love with each and everyone of us that "He did not spare His own Son but gave Him up for the benefit of us all." ( Romans 8:32). He wants us to be united with Him in everything that we do. "Then you shall be my people and I will be your God." (Ez 36: 28).

A writer of love letters is a writer in love, Love letter writers reveal the secret desires of their hearts, their ambition, their reason for acting the way they do. This is God's driving ambition for us, that we shall be His people and He will be our God. That we will all live happily ever after.

If all of us knew this beautiful secret, then there would be no crimes, no suicides, no addictions, no emptiness. No squandering of our days.



The Angelus.

 

The Angelus is a beautiful prayer proclaiming the Mystery of the Faith, that through the Virgin's "yes" to the angel's annunciation, the "Word became flesh and dwelt among us." (John 1:14)
The tradition of praying the Angelus started in the thirteenth century, and by the sixteenth century it had become a custom to pray the Angelus three times a day, At six in the morning, at noon, and at six in the evening. The church bells tolled in those hours to remind the faithful to stop and pray this Marian devotion.
The nineteenth century artist Jean-Francois Millet  immortalized this beautiful and holy tradition in his famous painting above. Two farmers working in the field stop their work to pray at the sound of the bells. Upon meditating on the painting, one can sense the deep devotion of the faithful peasants, and one can almost hear the bells tolling from the distant country church in the background. The famous painting is now displayed at the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The Church attaches an indulgence of 100 days and plenary indulgence once a month granted to those who pray the angelus everyday.

Here is the prayer:

The Angelus

The Angel of the Lord declared to Mary:
And she conceived of the Holy Spirit. 

Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee; blessed art thou among women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of
our death. Amen. 

Behold the handmaid of the Lord: Be it done unto me according to Thy word. 

Hail Mary . . . 

And the Word was made Flesh: And dwelt among us. 

Hail Mary . . . 

Pray for us, O Holy Mother of God, that we may be made worthy of the promises of Christ.

Let us pray: 

Pour forth, we beseech Thee, O Lord, Thy grace into our hearts; that we, to whom the incarnation of Christ, Thy Son, was made known by the message of an angel, may by His Passion and Cross be brought to the glory of His Resurrection, through the same Christ Our Lord.

Amen. 

---

"Hail, full of grace, the Lord is with you" (Lk 1:28) 

 "Blessed are you among women,
 and blessed is the fruit of your womb"
(Lk 1:42). 

---

 

Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity.

Today November 8, the Church celebrates the feast of Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity. A Discalced Carmelite nun who was a member of the community of the Carmel of Dijon France.
She died on November 9 1906, at the age of 26 of Addisons disease, for which at the time there was no cure. Pope John Paul II beatified her on November 25 1984.
Elizabeth is best known for her Trinitarian Prayer which she composed on the night of September 21 1904. On that day, the feast of the Presentation of the Virgin Mary, the nuns of Dijon renewed their vows as they did every year.
The Prayer not only sums up her experience and life in God, but is also a map of the spiritual journey of all of us.

"O my God, Trinity whom I adore; help me to forget myself entirely that I may be established in You as still and as peaceful as if my soul were already in eternity. May nothing trouble my peace or make me leave You, O my Unchanging One, but may each minute carry me further into the depths of Your mystery. Give peace to my soul; make it Your heaven, Your beloved dwelling and Your resting place. May I never leave You there alone but be wholly present, my faith wholly vigilant, wholly adoring, and wholly surrendered to Your creative Action.

O my beloved Christ, crucified by love, I wish to be a bride for Your Heart; I wish to cover You with glory; I wish to love You...even unto death! But I feel my weakness, and I ask You to "clothe me with Yourself," to identify my soul with all the movements of Your Soul, to overwhelm me, to possess me, to substitute yourself for me that my life may be but a radiance of Your Life. Come into me as Adorer, as Restorer, as Savior.

O Eternal Word, Utterance of my God, I want to spend my life in listening to You, to become wholly teachable that I may learn all from You. Then, through all nights, all voids, all helplessness, I want to gaze on You always and remain in Your great light. O my beloved Star, so fascinate me that I may not withdraw from Your radiance.

O consuming Fire, Spirit of Love, "come upon me," and create in my soul a kind of incarnation of the Word: that I may be another humanity for Him in which He can renew His whole Mystery. And You, O Father, bend lovingly over Your poor little creature; "cover her with Your shadow," seeing in her only the "Beloved in whom You are well pleased."

O my Three, my All, my Beatitude, infinite Solitude, Immensity in which I lose myself, I surrender myself to You as Your prey. Bury Yourself in me that I may bury myself in You until I depart to contemplate in Your light the abyss of Your greatness.  Amen."


Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity, pray for us that we too may come to experience the presence of the Most Holy Trinity within us, and that we may come to love God with all our hearts, and minds, and souls.

Elizabeth of the Trinity is patron saint of the sick and of those who lose their parents.

God's friends are our friends.

Mary and the angels,

When they entered the house, they found Jesus with Mary His mother.

Matthew 2:11


In the presence of the angels I will bless you. Ps. 138.



Come let us rejoice and praise the Lord in the presence of the angels.

Read the Bible

Scripture and the Order of Carmel.        

Keep this book of the law on your lips, recite it by day and by night

that you may observe carefully all that is written in it, then you will

successfully attain your goal. I command you, be firm and steadfast,

do not fear or be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you

wherever you go.  Joshua 1: 8-9

Each of you is to stay in his own cell or nearby, pondering on the Lord;s law

day and night (Ps.1:2, Jos 1:8) and keeping watch at his prayers (1 Pt. 4:7).

Primitive Rule given by St. Albert of Jerusalem.

In Chapter 40 of the Book of Her Life. St. Teresa of Jesus states that the Lord spoke to her these words;

"All the harm that comes to the world comes from its not knowing the truths of Scriptures in clarity and truth. not one iota of Scripture will fall short"

"The Virgin, weighed with the Word of God

comes down the road,

If only you shelter her."

St. John of the Cross.

                

O Most Blessed Virgin Mary Mother and Queen of Carmel,

help me today to meditate on the word of God that like you

I may ponder it and treasure it in my heart. 

Dear Mother, pray for me that I may live the spirit of Carmel. 

Amen.

Listening to Silence, Listening to God.

God fills the silent intervals between sounds, and noises, and conversation. Look for Him there, and you are sure to find Him.
My father had an uncle who had a small patch of land surrounded by high walls on top of the hill in Kalkara. He called it the garden. In winter my father used to take me for walks in the country, mostly in the afternoons, and if we passed by the garden, and my father's uncle was there, he would usher us inside the walls, proudly showing my father the crops in the neat dark soil. If they were ready he would give us some vegetables to take home to my mother.
There was a room in the garden where my father's uncle had a table and two chairs, and where he kept his tools. They would sit in that room together talking about this and that, while I stayed out in the silence of the garden among the silent crops.
Not far from that corner, at the top of the hill, stood a Franciscan convent, with the silent empty church which we also visited. No one seemed to be ever there in those hours, my father would kneel for a few minutes, his eyes on the tabernacle by which burned a single candle in the sanctuary. Then we would walk out as quietly as we entered. One day on the road to the church we passed a young friar, wearing a beard and sandals, and matching his habit he carried a bag on his shoulder. I remember clearly those sandals in the winter. As we passed him he seemed to me he was praying, for there was a serene look on his face, and he walked with his eyes looking down to the graveled road, his sandals crunching as he came toward us. As he passed us he raised his head and nodded to my father who quietly did the same. I did not realize it then, but years later it occurred to me that he might have been praying for us at that moment.
Just outside the church there was a little grotto of Our Lady of Lourdes, barred with an iron gate, and some candles always burning, and some coins that people would have thrown on the tiled floor. Our Lady holding a rosary in her hands, and little Bernardette kneeling in silent prayer.
Then we would take the narrow road leading to the sea. On one side there was the high wall of the naval cemetery, whenever I looked through the bars of the iron gate I never saw anyone visiting the tombstones there, but it was always silent and sort of serene , with the marked graves arranged in neat rows and resting peacefully in the silence of the winter afternoon.
The country roads were often empty and quiet, even the lone country dog who stared at us with sad eyes never seemed to bark.
Finally we would reach the ever changing sea. Wind or calm there would be a ship or two out there on the horizon, silently gliding over that vast expanse.
There are many memories buried in my mind, of us two walking in the winter wind along the sea. Precious silent moments, for my father was always reserved by nature and hardly ever spoke to me as we walked. But he seemed to revel in the pensive quietude of those occasions.
And before long, we would be back in the more populated areas, heading towards home.
These memories of days long gone, now serve to strengthen my conviction that even then, God was manifesting His presence to me. a Divine Friend, happy to be in our company, His presence so strong and yet so discreet. He was there hounding me in my winter walks with my father.
In Later years, as I went through turbulent periods in my life, those childhood experiences lay repressed beneath the storms of life, only to be retrieved with joy in God's good time.

"Come and see the man who told me everthing I ever did." John 4:29.

I have often thought that if I had to choose a Gospel personality that I would like to be, that person would definitely be the Samaritan woman. Here is a person not very much esteemed in the society of that time, a woman, a Samaritan, one who did not have a husband, who was probably poor, laden with problems, and a person whose future looked pretty bleak. Yet the fact that she had had five husbands and was, at the time she met Jesus, living with a man who was not her husband, shows her to be a beautiful woman, of a strong personality, intelligent and determined to find "Mr. Perfect" in her life. A practical and functional woman able to fetch her own water and carry on with her life.
As she goes to the well she sees a man sitting there, quiet and peaceful in His manners, and looking rather tired. She tries to ignore Him even though He is looking at her with kind and gentle eyes. Her feminine instinct is on the alert. She is a woman who knows men and also knows what they are capable of. Yet the Evangelist tells us that Jesus asked her for a drink and from there He led her through a conversation which brought about her conversion. "come and see the man who told me everything I ever did."
This woman went to fetch water and there encountered Christ. He reads and reveals her soul to her. She is given the grace to know and see everything she ever did. All her sins and failures. This is a sort of a personal version of the "Warning" in the way some prophets of our time, and Scripture, say that everyone will soon experience. It is a great grace for the Samaritan woman, because she experiences a profound conversion.
I am inclined to think of her as one who became a close follower of the Lord, making her way into the small group of women who provided for Him out of their own means. On the way she must have become a spiritual daughter of the Blessed Virgin, His Mother. And I am apt think that she was one of the select few who were given the grace to be witnesses to His crucifixion. Those souls were chosen from all eternity.
We know through tradition that those persons at the foot of the Cross as the Evangelist mentions them, ended up living the rest of their days in silent contemplative prayer, doing penance and meditating on the great event that they had witnessed.
We know that the Mother of Jesus ended up in Ephesus with John, the beloved disciple of the Lord, They lived a quiet, prayerful life, silently pleading for the success of the early Church.
So too tradition tells us, that Mary Magdalene, who was also at the foot of the Cross, made her way west
where she spent the last decades of her life in a small hermitage on a mountain in France.
Think about it a little. Who could experience such an enormous event as the crucifixion of the Son of God, the greatest event in history, without being profoundly effected by it?
And so to must those few women who stood at a distance watching that Divine Drama unfold. Never has a human being been witness and experienced such intense love from the One who is Love Himself as those select few who were on Golgotha on that Friday afternoon.
The Samaritan woman who had encountered Christ by the well of Jacob may have very well been one of those women. Furthermore she may have very well been called to spend the rest of her days in silent solitary meditation of her Lord's passion.
In those days the Gospels had not yet been written, but those who were given the grace to experience those Divine events were indelibly marked and in their memory, was imprinted the greatest story ever told. A memory from which they could draw their meditations for the rest of their lives in this world.
"O the depths and the riches of the wisdom and the knowledge of God, how inscrutable His judgements, how unsearchable His ways."
Perhaps this is the reason He allowed the other apostles to run away from the experience on Golgotha. For if they too had been eyewitnesses of those most Sacred moments, they would have also become strict contemplatives and would not have spread around the world preaching the Good News.