I’d like to take this opportunity
to thank you for supporting me and The Sacred Braid Ministry in 2017
by reading The Almond Tree, offering comments, encouragement,
and financial donations,
as well as inviting me to your community
to give talks, lead retreats, or offer parish missions.
I am grateful to you.

At the beginning of this new year of 2018, I’d like to offer two fitting Life-Lines.

Today’s Life-Lines are:

Abba Poemen said about Abba Pior that every single day he made a fresh beginning.

~ Sayings of the Desert Fathers

In the spiritual life there are no tricks and no shortcuts. . . . One cannot begin to face the real difficulties of the life of prayer and meditation unless one is first perfectly content to be a beginner and really experience oneself as one who knows little or nothing, and has a desperate need to learn the bare rudiments. Those who think they “know” from the beginning never, in fact, know anything. . . . We do not want to be beginners. but let us be convinced of the fact that we will never be anything but beginners, all our life!

~ Thomas Merton

If The Almond Tree and The Sacred Braid have benefited you
please consider passing the word or the link
to two or three people who might enjoy or benefit from it.
Gratefully,
Dan