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What is a "lara"? Why a "pelican lara"? A lara is a place of prayer and reflection. In quantitative terms, it is somewhere between a hermitage and a monastery; usually uniting more than one but less than the twelve souls that make up the traditional cenobitic community. In qualitative terms, a lara strives to approximate the monastery's ideal of praising God in the Hours of the Divine Office, and its work of preserving the knowledge of God as we have received it through the Scriptures and the writings of the great fathers and doctors of the Church. The spelling varies -- sometimes "laura," sometimes "lauvre," or something similar. We have elected to use "lara," which pronounces about the same, and seems appropriate in the English language. We have named our lara for the Pelicans which grace the nearby Atlantic littoral, often seeming to hang in the sky between heaven and earth, and occasionally coming down to walk among God's earthbound creatures. In Christian art the "Pelican vulning herself" -- a mother bird cutting into her own flesh to feed her young with her blood -- is a symbol of Jesus Christ shedding His Precious Blood for the redemption of God's adopted sons and daughters, and a symbol of His Catholic Church distributing the graces of His redemption in the Mass and Sacraments.
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