Our second Blogging 101 assignment was to tinker with our blog’s title and tag line.

Well, I have had this title ever since I started blogging five years ago, on Google’s Blogger, and I really do not want to let it go.

How did the title come about?  Well, I am Franciscan at heart, as well as in reality (a lay Franciscan)!  Among the most popular Franciscan saints, after St. Francis of Assisi, is St. Anthony of Padua, a Portuguese friar, who wanted to be a missionary in North Africa; but wound up in Italy.  It was there that his talent for preaching was discovered, and he was sent off to preach throughout Northern Italy and Southern France.  Towards the end of his life, he went off to a small Franciscan friary, near the Italian city of Padua. There he had a sort of tree house built-in a walnut tree; it was going to be a place of quiet, contemplative, prayer for Anthony, a hermitage.  Legend has it that people would still come to the friary, seeking a good word from him.  And he would preach from the branches of the walnut tree.  It is this story that inspired the title for this blog