El Far i la Immaculada

El Faro y la Inmaculada
The Lighthouse and the Immaculate

As some of you may know, I have recently changed host families.  I am absolutely delighted with my family and will soon post pictures of them and my new house.  Today is the Feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  It's a Catholic holiday and is pretty important in Spain, so much so that priest here have special permission to wear blue at Holy Mass, a privilege only canonically enjoyed by Spain and it's previous colonies.  I will add a photo of Father that I took below.  We also took a nice mid-morning walk out to the light house in a nearby town called L'Alfàs del Pi where there's a lighthouse with some wonderful views.  Here's some photos:

Dinner Table

Lunch!  Spanish sausages with potato purée

Host Family at the table, more details to come in a soon to come post

The grandkids

View of the mountains from our building

Just for piety's sake: one of my favourite paintings of our Lady, incidentally painted by a Spaniard and
housed in the Prado museum in Madrid

Father in his blue vestments!

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I have to make an aside here and talk some liturgical jargon...if this doesn't interest you keep on enjoy the photos of the wonderful views...so here goes.  At our parish we have literally huge closets full of fiddleback vestments for Priests, Deacons, and Subdeacons.  I am always eager to see them used at mass but unfortunately, our liturgical situation her is lacking more than a few things.  There are two sets of blue ones which resemble the following photos.  Just so you know, these are neither my photos, nor our parish.  Just for the interested:

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Alrighty, after that brief distraction for the few and far between I present you all with some more photos of the sea and of the trail up to the lighthouse:

As always, I hope you enjoyed and I appreciate the time you took to read this and keep up with what I'm doing, I hope the religious stuff wasn't too much of a bore.  I genuinely appreciate all of your support as well as your prayers and keeping in touch!

Pax & Bonum,

Sean