Saving the memories

I was talking on the phone to one of my mentors in early days in Carmel yesterday.  Her memories of Secular Carmel go right back to the Nineteen-Eighties, and I was encouraging her to write down an account of her early years, because there are very few people left alive who know anything first-hand about the Seculars that time.  There were meetings in a Carmelite Convent on the corner of Moreton Road and Banbury Road in Oxford, but as yet I have not yet been able to find out the name of that Convent, and she herself does not remember it, though I have ascertained that it was closed in 1987 and the building was demolished the following year.  After this, Oxford OCDS meetings moved to the Boars Hill Friary outside the town.  Quite recently my OCDS community decided in the light of the fact that there were as many as four of our communities meeting separately at Boars Hill, we should move out into the city to light our candle there.  The upshot was that we moved into a room at SS Gregory and Augustine Church on the Woodstock Road, not very far from Moreton Road – so the wheel has turned full circle, as it so often does in life. 

Intercessions:

Cancer: Brian Davis, Marie, Bernard (and wife Angela caring for him), Jacqui, Sue B, Theresa K

Siena, Elara – sick children

Wojtek – massive heart attack leaving him incapacitated

David OCDS - housebound

Sophia – blind infant

Joy Smith OCDS – seriously ill

Grace – troubling ailments, job difficulties, family (deceased mother and health of father)