In these northern parts, spring comes in spurts, teasing us for a few days with her warmth and light and then retreating as winter temperatures rush back. But, serene in the knowledge that she will triumph, she keeps coming back, joyfully revealing her presence more and more.

March is sugar bush time in rural areas in this part of the world—the time when sugar maple trees are tapped and their sap boiled down into a delicious syrup whose flavor cannot be duplicated.

Our sugar shack where the sap is brought and boiled down is a great place to visit. So when Sunday afternoon turned glorious with sunshine (though not with warmth), some of us took the long walk up there.

There you can "check out" the operation, watch the sap boil, taste the new syrup, eat pancakes and a kind of candy formed by pouring hot syrup on the snow, and just be together, chatting and, depending on who is there at the time, listening to others of us playing fiddle and guitar.

Lent is also the time for staff study: small groups spending part of Friday afternoon learning something together. This year we chose our subjects, and the variety was wide including poetry, St. Paul, intermediate French, weaving, Gregorian chant, home nursing, and some of Catherine’s writings. One group watched an excellent t.v. series of videos on Canadian history.

As Catherine used to say, "Nothing is foreign to the apostolate except sin."

On February 21st St. Mary’s celebrated its fifteenth anniversary. St. Mary’s is the community that MH started "down the road" when we outgrew our original living quarters. Composed of approximately 40 people, it is very like one of our mission houses except that it is much bigger. It is housed in what used to be a convent boarding school.

Last Sunday evening, St. Mary’s hosted a Lenten Sacred Music hour in their chapel. It began with the idea of playing for Susanne Stubbs, who had not heard them, the songs Maryana Erzinger and Sandy Brewer wrote for Donna’s funeral. Then, as tends to happen with such things, it grew into a full program including other songs that Maryana had written, one by Veronica Dudych, and a few traditional hymns. It was a beautiful, prayerful event.

St. Mary’s is also having to do major renovations to get the building up to regulations for fire safety. There have been ongoing meetings of both men and women to work out ways to peacefully facilitate the necessary changes.

Lent is a good time for retreats. Helen Hodson gave the applicants a three-day Ignatian retreat, and Fr. Murray Kuemper gave a retreat to our three eastern American houses: Raleigh, Roanoke, and Washington.

Theresa Girard went to Raleigh, North Carolina to give a talk, Finding Joy in the Duty of the Moment at a conference called Ignited by Truth.

Helen Porthouse, who has had multiple sclerosis for many years, gave a talk on God in Pain and Suffering in Peterborough, Ontario for Theology on Tap. The young people attending had asked for that topic.

Two of the MH bookkeepers, Mary McGoff and David Williams, attended a workshop on Christian charities, and three people took a first aid course.

Finally, after two postponements due to deaths, we saw the classic Greek play, Antigone. Neil Patterson directed it, wrote the music for the chorus, and played the leading male role. It was beautifully done, and well worth waiting for.

Three new books have come out: (1) Light in the Darkness: A Christian Vision for Unstable Times, (MH Publications) composed of excerpts from the writings of Catherine Doherty combined with scripture quotes. (2) Comrades Stumbling Along, containing the correspondence between Catherine Doherty and Dorothy Day (edited by Fr. Bob Wild and put out by St. Paul’s Press), and (3) Catherine de Hueck Doherty: Essential Writings by Fr. David Meconi S.J.(Orbis Press). All three are available from MH Publications, and we’ll be telling you more about them in upcoming issues.

This past week has certainly been a time of work bees: First there was the Friday morning bee to mail out the April Restoration. Then a few days later, there was a bee for whoever was available and able to handle a paint brush to paint the newly renovated men guests’ dorm. Plus, we are beginning to receive responses to our begging letter bee, which will mean, God willing, thank you letter-writing bees.

Our directors general just returned from a visitation to MH Vancouver. Said Susanne Stubbs: "Mary Lynn, Aliz, and Emmanuella (the three staff of that house) are living in unusual harmony.

"The peace and love among them is hard won as these gifts of the Spirit always are. It is won by a kind of openness among them that Catherine always wished for us."

Another piece of good news coming from that visitation is that Susanne was able to make it at all. As we told you last month, she broke her hip in early February and had to have surgery for a replacement.

And here’s another piece of follow-up news that is also good news: Joe Walker, who moved from our care facility for elderly staff to the local nursing home is happily making new friends and likes the activities so much that sometimes when someone from here visits during one of them, rather than stopping for a visit, he simply invites that person to join in!

Constantly, very much in our hearts and prayers, are the events taking place in the world. These days the United States, our neighbor to the south, is especially so. We pray for wisdom for those dealing with the economic crisis and for those affected by it and for an end to the increasing culture of death legislation that cannot help but result in a huge increase of the slaughter of the unborn, not only in the United States but throughout the world.

And so our lives continue—our daily work, our prayer, our celebrations, our joys, our sufferings. All are offered to Jesus through Mary for all the world.