Getting ready

Mt dear Friends

Slowly, slowly, I am getting ready for the next trip to Canada. Naturally I hope this will be the last before immigration, but I must take each trip as it comes and enjoy its riches. this time a friend has suggested, as I am already quite tired from all my travels, that I plant myself in the Hostel and 'just see what happens.'

Great advice and already my dear Goddaughter, Eleanor, will arrive from the States to spend the first weekend with me. We met in the University library tearoom and I discovered she plays the clarinet. Benigna had many happy hours accompanying her on the piano. And, to my delight, Eleanor was received into the Catholic Church in the beautiful chapel in Grange road. It was there that I lived in the garden house with three other students, to test out my religious vocation in 1991.

It s wonderful to have a Goddaughter and we will have much to share, as it is quite a time since we have seen each other. And I already know my way around the hostel and the environment downtown, having stayed there last March for a month. I now have a map of all the International Hosteling places in North America, and plan to stay for a night or two in Chicago.

Why Chicago? Well, really I will be on my way to South Bend, Indiana, which houses the University of Notre Dame, a famous Catholic University where Elie Wiesel, the French Jewish writer and survivor of the Holcaust, spoke to a group of Catholic priests, telling them that 'we are all waiting for the same thing.'

Gives me hope and the University of Notre Dame apparently houses a replica of the Grotto in Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary appeared to Bernadette. I have never been to Lourdes, and feel it unlikely that I will go now, as I am leaving Europe, so this is the next best thing! And one should never be snobbish...while Lourdes has never been at the top of my personal pilgrimage lists, I would like to see the Grotto in Notre Dame and have even had a kind of 'deja vu' about it.

Lots to think about and lots to plan but its wonderful to have taken up youth hostelling again after 40 years or so...watch this space.

Love and Shalom
Sister Gila