. .

"If my trust is shaky, my love is shaky. My love is not deep enough." --on impossible situations, Father Joseph Mary

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"Silence is spoken here." --signs on the walls at the priory

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Saturday, January 27, 6:15 a.m. Silent Prayer Hour: cold, bitter cold, so cold my breath freezes into tiny ice crystals taken into the wind where the chill factor is negative 2 degrees in today's high. I walk in the dark with a flashlight to the chapel and find all shrouded in darkness but for the single red glass candle, the brothers' hoods in silhouette as they kneel in prayer, the shadow of the crucifix squared, formidable, against the soft red light. I kneel too and try to think of beauty and of every person close to me.

(--Suddenly, as I write, a black and yellow butterfly the size of my palm appears in the window flapping its wings against the glass in vain, now, at the close of January, in the coldest winter I've known--)

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When I said I'm too cold to brush snow from the car and when you said I'll do it for you.

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"...but--"

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"--&."

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