Call for Questions and Suggestions

Readers of this blog could do me a great favor in the next two weeks or so. I am working on an extended project on diocesan eremitical life and it will include many of the topics I have discussed here over the past three years or so. Much of that is already due to questions you have sent me via email and I am very grateful for your assistance here.

However, what I would like to know from you is what questions, topics, concerns, dimensions I have missed, etc, would you like to see discussed in a book on the Canon 603 vocation (or on this blog for that matter). These might be really basic things I never cover very well, or, as noted, things I have never really dealt with.

They could be anything really including questions or concerns having to do with the Rule or Ratio vivendi (Plan of Life), the vows, essential elements of the life, formation -- whether initial or ongoing, history of the Canon and of eremitical life generally, desert spirituality generally, support and finances, lay hermits and their importance, countercultural or prophetic witness, urban hermits, lay and diocesan hermits' relationships with or to their parish, institutionalization of the vocation, recreation, relationships with others, psychological concerns or topics, contemporary (or other era) hermits including the desert Fathers and Mothers, or anything at all. (Perhaps you could think about what you would like to hear me (or any other hermit) talk about if I came to your parish to talk about this vocation or desert spirituality more generally!)

I am sure that even in my listing these things you will think of obvious questions (or whole areas!) I have never adequately addressed, or objections to things I have written here. I would very much like to read your input on all this as it will help make this project a very much better reality.

Please give this some thought and email me before the 10th of July if you can. If you can't make the 10th deadline, try to get your questions, etc to me by the 15th at the latest. (I will be away after that for retreat, etc, and I would like to have most of this before then.) After that perhaps I can post about what I have received and ask you all some questions on the basis of what you have shared.

When you email, please put something identifiable in the subject line: HERMIT PROJECT or something similar for instance. Thanks in advance for your assistance in this. I really appreciate it.

Sister Laurel, Er Dio
Stillsong Hermitage
Diocese of Oakland