Inspiration at Invocation...

...and this despite a drenching in the rain and the fact that Auntie went on to her exams at Maryvale with a dreadful cold.

The Invocation event - big gathering of Catholic young people with priests, seminarians, and members of different religious orders - merited a proper lengthy report rather than the chatty stuff I put on this Blog, so you must settle down and read about it here.

I honestly had not thought there were so many young religious sisters and brothers: you hear so much about religious orders dying out and I know only well that lots of them are, but I hadn't known about some of the newer things. Didn't know, for example, about a group called the Fraternas, based in Manchester. Knew about the Dominicans but didn't realise they had so many younger ones. Remembered the |H. Father visiting the Little Sisters of the Poor but didn't know much about them.

Now I am at Maryvale - exams this morning, and then a new course of lectures starts this evening and lasts all week. No, I'm not going to tell you how I think I did in my exams. Post-mortems are a waste of time. Onwards and upwards...mornings at Maryvale begin with the sound of the Brigettine sisters (some of them were at InVocation too) singing their office in the chapel,and then one knows it is about half-an-hour to Mass. The chapel is the one that John Henry Newman knew - his room, still in use for visiting students, adjoins the chapel at an upstairs level, and he wrote about the consolation of having Christ so near...after our morning Mass there is breakfast and then people disperse - today, there were various examinations and ours was in the main lecture hall, a nun invigilating, papers solemnly unsealed before us and then distributed desk by desk. Then a look at the clock and the announcement: "You may start"...