Some work departments have entered a quieter time. The gift shop is now on winter hours, and the staff there have closed the museum and put away the larger antiques that have spent the warmer months in the yard.

Joanne Weisbeck and helpers have closed down Cana Colony, our retreat-vacation place for families—a job which includes much behind-the-scenes cleaning and putting away.

The fruits of the earth have been harvested and the farmers and gardeners have “put the fields and gardens to bed.”

One of the last fall jobs of the farmers is the slaughter. This year, they and some generous friends who know the job well have slaughtered and butchered 7 cows and 29 lambs.

The food processors de-boned and packaged the meat, and finished the season with making sauerkraut (790 pounds of it), boiling soup bones for stock, making jelly, and grinding horse radish.

At this time of year, fewer people come, either for a tour or to stay a while and share our life, and many of us take our vacations.

But, still and all, there continues to be much work to do. We are never without lots to do. And between the rich liturgical life of the Church and our commemoration of the events of our own Madonna House history, we are never completely without feasts and celebrations.

First there was Thanksgiving Day. Though it was a workday for us, there were little things that made it special. Several people, led by Janine Gobeil, had gotten together to make strawberry-apple pies, no small project for our numbers, and we had them for Thanksgiving dessert.

And we had, as always, displays of vegetables from our harvest both in the dining room and under the altar in the chapel.

We also gathered, on the eve of Thanksgiving, as we have done for the past few years or so, to write thank you notes for the donations you sent in response to our begging letter. Writing those letters that evening was a wonderful reminder that we live completely on what is given to us and that we have so much to be thankful for, both to God and to you, our benefactors.

Then on October 15th we celebrated Foundation Day of Friendship House Toronto, the first house Catherine opened. It is the day she considered to be the foundation day of our Madonna House Apostolate.

For on October 15, 1934, Catherine Doherty, in response to God’s relentless call to her, and having sold all she had and given it to the poor, moved into a small apartment on a poor street in Toronto.

Though Catherine had had no intention of founding a community, this action was a profound “yes,” a profound surrender to God, a profound symbol of her decision to live the gospel without compromise. She did this after a long struggle, and she saw that day as her wedding day to God.

As always on October 15th we read the words she wrote about that day: “I would not exchange my wedding day to God in that gray shabby room, on that gray October day, for any other day anywhere. For behold, the pauper who wedded me in a slummy street, a crooked house, a shabby room, was a great King, and I became that day a queen, his spouse.”

We celebrated the day in various ways. We watched the video of the play about Catherine’s life, A Woman in Love, for example, and Fr. Wild gave a short talk about that day of surrender.

Also in connection with the 20th anniversary of Catherine’s death, we are reading together and discussing Catherine’s autobiographical book, Fragments of My Life. Though we of Madonna House have heard and read about the events of Catherine’s life over and over, her exciting and extraordinary story seems ever new and exciting.

Between that ongoing reading and our celebration of Friendship House Toronto Foundation Day, it certainly feels like we’ve already begun to celebrate the anniversary of Catherine’s death.

Another thing that happens during this late autumn time is classes. The applicants are well into theirs. They are reading the history of our apostolate and spending Friday afternoons in classes on various aspects of both Catholic and specifically Madonna House life.

Speaking of the applicants, we are happy to say that Joo-Eun Lee, who was unable to come for the September 8th reception of applicants because of her mother’s death, is now back with us.

The guests, too, are having classes. Every Wednesday morning they are studying “The Fundamentals of the Spiritual Life” with Fr. Sharkey, a class he has been giving the guests for years.

(He originally started giving it, he once said, because so many of the young people to whom he was giving spiritual direction were getting upset because, they “hadn’t totally conquered their anger—or pride or whatever—in three weeks!”)

The third group that has begun classes—once a week—is composed of the men of the spiritual formation program, a program of formation we have for young men who are discerning a vocation to priesthood.

This year, the 25th year of the program, the “pre-seminarians” are Danny Almeida (Toronto), Patrick Brown (Toronto), Jeremy Forest (Edmonton) and Fred Happy (Kingston, Ontario). In their class, taught by Fr. Tom Zoeller, they are studying Pope John Paul II’s encyclical about priesthood.

Finally, here’s some news in brief: In a tradition which started in the early 1970s, Mamie Legris, one of the original staff who also is originally from the local area, gave the applicants a tour of this area.

Two other local excursions were a hike led by Fr. Paul Burchat (an MH priest from nearby Barry’s Bay) and a tour of the abandoned corundum mines led by Hubert Perrier, a local friend and volunteer at our gift shop and museum.

Fr. Wild went to Cap de la Madeleine, Quebec, to attend the meeting of the Committee of the Founders of the Canadian Church. Since some of these founders are, like Catherine, up for canonization, many of the postulators of causes in Canada were in attendance.

Fr. Pat McNulty, who is familiar to all but our newest readers through his monthly column in Restoration, gave a day of recollection to the seminarians at St. Peter’s Seminary in London, Ontario.

Several people attended the Life Chain, the annual pro-life witness, in the nearby town of Barry’s Bay, Ontario.

Well, those are our news this time. May Christ and his Mother grant each of you a peace-filled, grace-filled Advent, and great joy at his birth.