When you consider the nasty personal insults Jerome wrote during his long years of scholarship, the friends he managed to keep are notable evidence of the presence of the Holy Spirit. For example, he sent St. Paula a letter rebuking her for her lack of faith in the resurrection while mourning the death of her daughter Blaesilla in 384:

“When you were carried fainting out of the funeral procession, whispers such as these were audible in the crowd. “She weeps for her daughter, killed with fasting. She wanted her to marry again, that she might have grandchildren. How long must we refrain from driving these detestable monks out of Rome...They have misled this unhappy lady; that she is not a nun from choice is clear. No heathen mother ever wept for her children as she does for Blæsilla.” What sorrow...Christ endured when He listened to such words as these!”

(New York: New Millenium Library, 2000. 232 pp., $10.95)

Willa Cather is rightly remembered for her vivid descriptions, insightful observations and keen eye for detail. Readers familiar with the worlds she explored were never disappointed. My Antonia doesn’t relate the story of a different world, such as her acclaimed novel Death Comes for the Archbishop. It is an autobiographical ode to the Midwestern roots that she cherished.

Protagonist Jim Burden is Cather’s stand-in. She also was born in Virginia, and moved to the Nebraska prairie as a child. Unusual for her era, Cather also attended the University of Nebraska and later moved to New York City, just as Burden does in the novel. She landed a succession of jobs in the editing and publishing worlds, and taught Latin and English in several venues before achieving financial success as a novelist in 1910, with the publication of O Pioneers.

The novel begins with Burden, a middle-aged lawyer, reminiscing with a fellow transplant about the town of their youth, and their memories of Antonia. Despite the possessive title, he does not claim Antonia for his own. Rather, throughout the novel, Jim Burden’s memories impose their own mark on his shared history with Antonia, and in this way Cather highlights Antonia’s merits, unmasked by a sympathetic friend with a romantic view of his childhood home. Her hardships only made her more beautiful, at least to Jim.

(Mother Martha Driscoll is the abbess of a Cistercian monastery in Gedono, Indonesia. She holds degrees from Georgetown University and Brandeis University. Her book,
Reading Between the Lines: The Hidden Wisdom of Women in the Gospels, was published in 2006.)

Kristen: Where did you grow up?
Mother Martha: I was born and grew up in Staten Island, New York in a very Irish Catholic family.  My parents scrimped and saved to send my sister and me to a Catholic girls’ academy. My only childhood tantrum was caused by the fact I had to leave the public school and all my friends. I never found the freedom I had had there with the nuns. The genuine love of my parents for each other and for the three of us is the real basis of my religious experience. God is Love.

(Click read more to see the rest of the interview, or visit the chapel to read a meditation by Mother Martha.)

The Upper Room served as a hiding place for the apostles in the days immediately following the crucifixion of Jesus. Understandably, they thought they might be next in line on Pontius Pilate’s hit list. Then, it was a place to ponder and praise the resurrection of Jesus. Small wonder Christians over the centuries have zealously sought out the actual room!

Like many sites in the Holy Land, the building is sacred to Jews and Muslims as well. King David’s Tomb rests in the basement. Damage during the war for Israeli independence allowed archaeologist Jacob Pinkerfeld to excavate the site while repairing it, and he found five different levels of flooring.