Sr. Mary Baruch told the novices in a conference on the Divine Office: "Praying the Psalms is like putting on a pair of old loafers that fit better and are more comfortable with each passing year."

If you have met Sr. Mary Baruch from The Early Years (Volume I), you have followed her with each passing year, coming to know her family, her friends, and the sisters in her monastery - Our Lady Queen of Hope. They have lived through family crises and deaths, crises of faith and moments of saving grace, the devastation of 9/11, and the sexual and political scandals in the country, the Church, and the monastic world.

Psalm 90 reads in part: "Our life is over like a sigh. Our span is seventy years or eighty for those who are strong . . . They pass swiftly and we are gone . . . "

Well . . . Sr. Mary Baruch is in her seventies now and going strong amidst new crises in her family, among her few remaining friends, and certainly with the nuns in her cloistered monastery. With a shortage of vocations and the older generation passing away-what will become of everyone? Will Our Lady Queen of Hope even survive? Will her later years be like a pair of old loafers? Or have they become irrelevant and discarded? Will Sr. Mary Baruch continue into her eighties saying: "Such a blessing!" Or will it be rather, "Lord have mercy?"