Lake County Ohio Weal

  A Flourishing Apostolic Church “It’s simply a letter about how we can draw closer to Christ, and there is no controversy in that,” Bishop Malesic said. “Let’s just pray 15 minutes a day; join a small group; invite your Catholic neighbors and friends together to have a cup of coffee and talk about ‘Why are you Catholic?’; ‘How can you become a disciple of Jesus?’  I think these are the basic things.”  I invite every Catholic in the Diocese of Cleveland to read this pastoral letter in its entirety, as I have written it with each of you in mind. Make notes and underline your copy of the letter; Consider reading it more than just once. then, meet with some other Catholics who have read this letter and discuss it in a small group. Over the next year I would like this letter to be at the forefront of conversations around the diocese.  OVERVIEW OF LETTER AND POST Underlines Sketches Overview      Part I: The Paschal Mystery We Catholic Christians first...

Can we in the United States, specifically in Lake County, learn anything from the lives of the first Christian hermits who lived in the deserts of the Middle East?  Almost a third of the households in Lake County are single person: 17.1% are female, 14.1% are male.  Can these households develop and share spiritualities that are more appropriate to themselves than to the remaining groups?  Households Persons HOUSEHOLD TYPE # % # % Single Person Female 17580 17.7 17580 7.6% Single Person Male 13905 14 13905 6.0% Married Persons 46086 46.4 Cohabiting Persons 7449 7.5 Female without Spouse 9932 10 Male without Spouse 4370 4.4 TOTAL 99324 ...

One of the many delights of responding to the bishop's letter has been the discovery that both Merton's original Seeds of Contemplation and its revision New Seeds of Contemplation are available on the internet as pdfs. That means that now on any electronic device they are instantly available from this post. Moreover, on a laptop computer with a monitor attached on can place them on separate screens for comparison.  The pdf pages numbers are different from the original book page numbers in case one has the original books. However, they are both out of print. In the following excerpts I have made Merton's language more inclusive and indicated where he changed SEEDS in NEW SEEDS,   In the additional material added below in NEW SEEDs Merton adopts the "we" style that I use in rereading SEEDS. The "man" language in the original is nota reflection of male language as in the Latin word (vir) rather it is a reflection of the Latin (homo) and Greek (anthropos) i...