Some updates on life in Pamplona and a beyond

Things have been quite busy and I have generally been avoiding the news, so my own world consists of pleasanter things than the trials of Trump, the crazy Tory policies, Ukraine, Israel, and the latest saga of corruption cases in Spanish politics, which reflect more personal vendettas than actual financial swindles. For not watching the news I seem to be quite up to date, I live with a family member that does stay up to date and she likes to comment. My information is partial.

One of the most interesting moments in recent times was when a week ago I remembered a conversation I had with a Dominican friar from the Western Province of the United States based somewhere in California. It’s was way back in the final Autumn before the pandemic and some details are now hazy. He is attached or at least teaching at an institution, or maybe it was a parish as well, named St Catherine of Siena. He told me a story of  a lay Dominican he had once known that had moved cities every couple of years for work and had in each new place begun a new Lay Dominican community. It just so happened that in her case she would move to places that hadn’t had one to begin with. This has not been my experience but I remembered it because for once I find myself in a similar situation and have been contacted by a Lay Dominican from another city in Spain who similarly finds herself now in Pamplona. Things in Spain are quite different, in many ways I feel England and its Fraternities have a bit of that initial spirit that informed the Third Order back in the early modern period, Spain I feel is just beginning to recover it after a 20th C that was quite an upheaval in so many ways to lay life. So it seems that this lady and myself may be starting something, not quite sure yet what. At the moment it feels a but like the student Dominican community begun in Cambridge some years ago. One of the beautiful things of moving around has been coming to know lay Dominicans in different cities and countries, and discovering that we are all Dominican but each place has its own particularities that respond to the needs of the locality. Very much like the church, both universal and local.

As things begin to kick off on the Spanish Pirinees, I contemplate the writing work ahead, the different projects begun last year in Oxford as well as the projects that have taken shape over the past 8 months. I think in particular of the idea, a seedling at the moment of a book I have in mind, and which I have discussed with some friends, which brings to light the beauty of the lived faith in what is a rather adverse environment, especially for Catholic women, mainly Western Europe, possibly some in the US. It is not an easy thing to write, we are all quite busy. This project feels necessary but one which requires a lot of thinking, prayering and preparing. 

And my Lutheran women, that book begun several years ago, accepted for publication and now stalled twice, first because Covid made it impossible to travel to Germany and now by my own personal life, too many things going on. As another summer begins, my third spent in the north of Spain, I wonder, will these slower months allow me time to focus on how Luther, his thinking, and those who contradicted him, contributed both in negative and positive ways to the world that we inherited in the 20th C, and which I am convinced, led to the rather radical responses given especially since the second half of the 20th C. 

What is clear is that we can plan, we can dream, in the end some things come out, some don’t. Rarely do they happened as we thought they would, sometimes that is a good thing, sometimes not, but we keep going, almost instinctively, but freely deciding to, because life is very much worth living. This makes me things of existus and reditus, and especially the reditus, the blessings we raise up in hope. This continued living are those blessings raised up in hope to our Lord who makes all things possible.