Found His Mittens

I took a two day bus trip to Ohio to see Father Corapi last week.  It was a fun trip.  The other people on the bus were sure characters.  I could write a book about the bus trip all by itself.

Like the woman who must have talked about Scott Hahn the entire trip.  She talked about the time she saw him, her favorite books, his favorite things, his quotes, his opinions, you name it.  She sat fairly near me the first day on the bus and I could have made a game out of just counting how many times I heard his name mentioned!  I heard her talking about him in the gift store later that day.

And there was Bob, with his poorly working hearing aides, who kept talking about some Manhattan Declaration, and about needing local Catholic town hall meetings.  He talked the priest’s ear off and kept punching him on the arm or ruffling his hair.  I’ve never seen that before!  Poor Father might have bruises.   I kept very quiet whenever he started looking around for someone else to talk to.  His wife kept telling him to hush.  She mentioned the word leash a couple of times.  The second day he got hold of the microphone a few times and talked about the same concepts to the whole bus.

We stopped by the Maria Stein Shrine first, which is in the care of the Sisters of the Precious Blood.  They have a little museum, and gift shop (very nice) and a beautiful shrine where over 1000 relics are housed.    http://www.mariasteincenter.org/

This is a relic of the True Cross.  The pictures below show the very ornate pieces made to hold numerous relics.

A picture of the altar rail, very very beautiful.

I’m always a sucker for a pretty window.

These are all relics in this case.  Although, I think some few of the recent arrivals here are not yet declared saints.

Then we went to Our Lady of the Holy Spirit Center, a former seminary, which is being/has been renovated.  They have tenants there that include Sacred Heart Radio, where The Sonrise Morning Show is taped, and they do retreats and have masses and so on.  Unfortunately, no air conditioning… my skin felt like it was glowing while we were in there.   http://olhsc.org/

They had really large, neat stations of the cross.

I particularly liked the image of the Holy Spirit which was actually suspended from the roof in the main chapel.  They also have perpetual adoration in the next room.

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I loved this one.

I absolutely loved these statues too.  When I was standing there, the one on the left looked very lifelike.  The three saints are probably St Theresa the Little Flower, St Rose of Lima, and St Rita of Cascia, as seen from right to left.

I was too tired to go to St Mary’s church that night, it would have been my first Tridentine Mass and I even brought my headscarf I made just for a Latin mass, but I wanted to catch up on sleep for the big conference.  I heard later that that church had no air conditioning either, so I made the right choice.

The next day was spent at the Cintas Center at Xavier University, to see four talks by Father Corapi.  It was great, as expected.  I bought the DVD set, as I had to leave my seat for the bathroom several times and had trouble grasping the information.  Also I have the encyclical on social teachings to read first.  Father Euteneuer was the emcee, he has written two books on exorcism and is the president of Human Life International.  The music was done by Tatiana (Tajci) Cameron, that was the icing on the cake for me.  I wish she did more live songs, they only had her sing one song at a time, about five songs total.  But then she led the singing during the mass at the end, and that was just perfect.  Too bad she wasn’t selling her cds there, she could have sold a lot.  She deserves to be more widely known.

Almost 10,000 people were there, according to Father’s website.  We were in the very very very back, but actually that gave me better elbow room for knitting, so that worked out.  Can you even see him there behind the podium?  The big screens were certainly useful.

Tajci.

I was taking a picture of her in closeup on the big screen when they switched views on me.  I thought it looked pretty neat.

Father states he has his health back, exercises with a personal trainer, and weighs what he did in high school.  He certainly seems to have his energy back.  He also has a Harley and a concealed gun permit.  He told us how he recently ran and charged a private detective who was in the woods taking pictures of him, looking for “dirt,” scared half to death when he Father popped out with his gun!

This is the stage area, all prepared for mass.  Tajci is explaining to us all how the songs will go.

I got a lot of  knitting work done on the trip  I knitted on the bus, in my hotel room, and during the entire conference except for mass.  I worked on a big baby blanket, now 1/3 done, and a baby surprise jacket. I finished the jacket today.  I used the original Baby Surprise pattern by Elizabeth Zimmerman, and used koigu yarn.  I think I used size 3 needles.  I’ll use a bigger size next time.  I THINK this will fit the 0-3 month age as it is supposed to, but I wish it were a tad bigger.  It fits Lucy perfect, and that makes me a bit nervous.  I have some yarn left to make a collar but I don’t know that I will do that.

For those who don’t know, this is made all in one piece.

Sew up the shoulder seams and presto! A jacket.