Novena to Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin, canonized parents of the Little Flower, begins July 4

I am excited to share a new (to me) novena to Sts. Louis and Zélie Martin this year. I have been praying a novena to the holy Martins for the past four years, and have hosted it on my blog three of those years.

Sts. Louis and Zélie as we will learn through praying this novena lived a very holy life together. They had nine children, four of whom died in infancy or childhood. Their five surviving daughters all joined convents. Four of them including the youngest St. Thérèse of Lisieux became Carmelites, and their daughter who struggled the most to behave Leonie became a Visitation sister after three other attempts to enter the convent. Leonie now has a cause for canonization, and we named our baby who miscarried in November after her. Zélie died of breast cancer at the age of 45, but Louis lived on and eventually died at the age of 71 after suffering from dementia and other illness for six years. The were beatified in 2008 by Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and canonized in 2015 by Pope Francis.

The professor and I have been devoted to the Martins since 2009 when we attended a series of talks about them at Carmel in Buffalo, New York. I look forward every year to praying to them up to their Feast day of July 12, which is their wedding anniversary, and have seen and experienced great fruits in my marriages and that of other for whom we have prayed for.

Some friends of came across this particular novena to the Martins in France from Basilique Notre-Dame des Victoires in Paris. They have worked laboriously to translate the novena from French into English and have even obtained permission from the rector of the basilica for me to publish here on my blog.

I am super excited to share this beautiful novena with you.

I will be posting each day of the novena which goes from July 4-July 12 on my blog the night before each day--the date to pray each day will be in the title line of the post.

If you would like to receive it by email you can sign up to receive my blog email updates in the side bar of the home page of my blog.  Or you can follow the novena through my Facebook page.

If you would like to simply print it off, follow this linkfor a PDF of the novena.

I also would love to pray for your intentions during this novena. Please leave any intentions you would like me to pray for during this novena in the comments or feel free to email me at livingwithladyphilosophy at gmail dot com.

I can't wait to pray with you!

NCRegister: The Desert is Where We Find God

The fertile forests of Yosemite National Park in California, which we had camped in the night before, had given way to the dry, rocky land of Nevada, and our minivan sped on in a land where cities and towns are few and far between. We were on the final week of our three-week western road trip. It had all been so beautiful, but here, in this empty, dry land a sense of dread lay heavy on my chest. The desert went on for miles before us and behind us. Rocks rose occasionally into mountains and cliffs in the distance, but their barrenness only added to the bleakness of the path we had to take. And everything seemed closer on the horizon than it actually was, making each mile seem longer.

This family road trip was the first time I had experienced the desert, and what surprised me the most was the amount of life, life adapted to the environment, that struggled on even in this most desolate of climates.

Read more at the National Catholic Register...

This Summer's Garden

We put our garden in about a month late this year due to our little trip Out West. The week before we went on vacation we planted a few seeds: some sugar snap peas, carrots, kale, and lettuce. When we came home all but the lettuce had come up. I think the lettuce may have died in the Memorial Day heat wave the Midwest had while we were out in California.

I had a medical scare the week after we got home. The kind where you are thinking about how many years or months you might have to live. We had to wait over a weekend for a test, and that weekend when we left the health clinic unsure of the future all I wanted to do was garden. I wanted to get my flowers and vegetables and put them in the ground. I wanted to weed and care for the earth I that has been given to my care.

So the professor and I did just that. We went to the local garden store with the children and picked over what was left of the vegetables and flowers. I went back the next day and picked out some new perennials. If I was going to be super sick, I wanted to see flowers all summer, and I wanted the flowers to be there for years to come. Now, that I know I am not super sick, I am just happy to have the flowers to remind me of the goodness of being alive.

But that weekend we did not know, and we weeded the out of control garden beds, and dug and planted our tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, basil, parsley, and cilantro. We planted our dusty miller, panseys, and allysum. We dug up the grass on either side of our front walk, giving the sod to a neighbor who came by walking her dogs. We put in a decorative egder, and planted black-eyed susans, coneflowers and nepeta.

And now our garden is ready for summer. Our raspberries are ripening. I am slowly getting better from an illness that wiped me out after our trip, but turned out to be one I will survive.

The professor and I are writing this summer--he is on sabbatical this Fall and is writing a book. I am trying to get my projects in order. I am planning my own book idea (still in the very baby stages, but I want to get it ready to propose to a publisher this summer). I have home school books to order. And the next school year on the horizon. We still have a subject or two to wrap up (MATH).

But mostly we are just enjoying that it is summer. The windows are open most days. I am trying to rest on the patio. The kids are taking swim lessons, and scouring the garden for food that is ripe. And the flowers are blooming, and will continue to bloom.

Flowers and shrubs, bless the Lord. Praise and exalt Him above all forever.

NCRegister: John the Baptist and Your Gift of Prophecy

I was born two weeks late during a hot, humid St. Louis summer. My mother, who never complains of physical discomforts, claims that she does not remember being particularly uncomfortable during that time of waiting, but perhaps she just has forgotten. I was stubborn from the beginning. My mother had hoped for a family birth, but I waited to be born until my two older sisters were taken out of the delivery room by my grandmother for a snack.

I took my first breath on the Nativity of St. John the Baptist, and was given a name that my parents had prayed long and hard about. Because of this I have long been devoted to my “birthday buddy” relating to his call to contemplation and prophecy. When I followed my call into the married life I realized that I while I had not chosen the “better part” of Mary, even my life as a Martha made way for a closeness to and constant companionship with God with a irrepressible desire to bear witness to God.

Rest the rest at the National Catholic Register...

#theprofessorgoeswest

It all started last November shortly after we miscarried our baby. The professor and I were finally getting to making and canning jam out of our frozen berries that we had picked in the summer, and trying to console ourselves in our loss. Then it suddenly occurred to us that we had a window in our childbearing years that allowed for the massive camping road trip that we had always talked about doing *someday*. (Now don't get me wrong...camping has never my favorite activity...but now that our trip is over I like it more than when we started. In fact thanks to the self-inflating Thermarest air mattress, I slept about how I normally do when not in my own bed.)

I said that I would be willing to do the trip if we broke it up by staying in hotels or with people we knew on the road. And that is when we really got planning. We were going to see 10 National Parks, several State Parks, and as many of the California Missions as we could fit into our schedule. We made it inside of 8 and saw 3 more from the outside. 

We had 11 nights camping, 4 in hotels, and 7 with friends (thank you sooooo much friends!).

The trip was amazing. The drives were long, but the views were so, so worth all of the effort of going there and back again. We made the drive more enjoyable by listening to The Lord of the Rings on audiobook, and we still have some left to finish out on a later road trip.

I will probably spend the rest of the summer writing up my thoughts from our road trip. In the meantime, head on over to my Instagram account to see all of the pictures I posted from our three weeks on the road.