Miscellaneous
Erin-Thérèse, from the United States: "My husband and I got married in the Easter break of our last year of university and after graduation, we moved from London to Devon where we made our first home together. We were in love with the Devonshire moors and chose to live in Ivybridge, which is a town that forms the gateway to the Two Moors Way, so we could spend as much time exploring the moorlands as we could. Many of my afternoons were spent walking up to Dartmoor, particularly around the area known as the Western Beacon, and looking back, I would call that moor my Damascus. It was here finally, that the beauty of God overwhelmed me, seduced me, drew me into Him---I would pass through groves of hawthorn, hedgerows laden with wildflowers and spicy with the scent of summer, and when I issued out into the open moorland with martins swooping above me, it was as though a veil had been lifted, and I was gazing beyond the beauty of the landscape into the face of the Author of Beauty, the Great Mystery Himself. I could say with Wordsworth, in his Lines Composed above Tintern Abbey, “And I have felt / A presence that disturbs me with the joy / Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, / And the round ocean, and the living air, / And the blue sky, and in the mind of man, / A motion and a spirit, that impels / All thinking things, all objects of all thought, / And rolls through all things.” I think what changed at this time was that God was no longer a philosophical question, He was a personal presence in my life and would only grow to be more so. I would call it a mutual inbreathing, He was visiting me, stretching out His hand to me, filling me up with His Spirit, and there was such a sense of intimate communion that I discovered God to be not a ‘what’ but a ‘who.’ This was the turning point and this was what enabled me to become a Christian, encountering God became the great romance of my life, and it was from here that I fell in love with Jesus Christ, who is the incarnate Presence of God among us." Music by aniel Weatherley. Visit Totus2us.com for much more, which is inspired by Blessed John Paul II, Papa Benedict XVI and Pope Francis. Totus Tuus (All Yours) was JPII's motto to Our Lady.