Or, our monk, the mayor:

Monk becomes mayor of Florida town

From his small-town roots in rural Ohio, the Saint Leo Abbey monk found in St. Leo a town sharing so many similarities to his home, that he embraced it as his life’s destination. Last week, the town embraced him back when commissioners unanimously named him mayor.

In the town’s form of government, commissioners are elected to two-year terms, then each year pick a mayor from among their ranks.

I know this area very, very well. It’s just about 30 minutes north of Lakeland, where I used to live, and we would go to St. Leo’s on occasion, and I took kids there to use the space for retreat days a couple of times.

Just to set the scene for the article, though: while the county (Pasco) is growing by leaps and bounds, the town is pretty tiny, not much more than a few streets and a town square (on which sits a Catholic school). We had our Easter picnic there once, after going to Mass at the Abbey.

I wrote this, which was published in First Things a while back after attending another Easter Mass at my own parish and being (of coursed) extremely annoyed. It’s a comparison of that with a Mass at St. Leo’s, with the point of reflection being how young people take it all in.

(And for those you who wonder about this writing thing works – I sat down and wrote the piece in a white heat, and a voice said, “Send it to First Things.” So I did, and they published it. So, sometimes it’s hard work, and sometimes it all just comes together, on intuition and instinct, in a couple of hours)