First Friday of Lent: 19th February.

Up at 06:00am to say Lauds and morning devotions. The snow has begun again today.
Today I began Adomnan's De Locis Sanctis (The Holy Places), a record of a sixth century, Gaulish Bishop's pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and journey through parts of the Holy land, and various places on his voyage. Adomnan claims to have recorded these travel memoirs from conversations held with the aforementioned Bishop, Arculf, when he was shipwrecked on Iona on his return journey to his native Gaul (Adomnan was abbot of Iona, of course). Whether Arculf existed, and these conversations actually took place, or whether Adomnan was employing the construct 'Arculf' as a literary device in order to engage in a form of geographically-centred scriptural exegesis, I do not know, as yet, but I shall inform you of my thoughts and findings as my investigation progresses.

I spent an hour with Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament in the afternoon at Exposition. What a thing it is to contemplate the Eucharist: Christ is more real than any perceived reality - the Host is truly the REAL presence, in a world which we must attempt to regard almost in terms of absence.
How do I negotiate the physical qualities of the Host? It's appearance, taste, colour etc? It appears identical post-consecration to pre-consecration, however, before consecration it was, and now it IS. The only object I will ever see that is totally real, in any sense, is the Eucharist, therefore, it must, by absolute necessity be THAT around which my entire life must revolve.
More about the Eucharist next Friday.