Tuesday (St Francis de Sales)

  • Morning Prayer in the cathedral.
  • Touched base with the Archdeacon on a couple of ongoing concerns.
  • Spoke by phone with one of our rectors over a couple of emerging concerns.
  • Arranged for publication of the news that Fr Jim Fackler died yesterday. Spoke with Fr Baumann in Salem, who was his immediate pastoral contact. Spoke with one of Fr Fackler's sons and conveyed my condolences to the family. (Travel plans this weekend prevent from presiding at the funeral.) And since Fr Jim still technically "belonged" to him and was "on loan" to us, I rang up Bishop John Roth, my ELCA opposite number, to bring him up to speed.
  • Ad hoc but substantive in-person conversation with Dean Andy Hook about a range of cathedral-related matters.
  • Reviewed some papers in my capacity as one of the two co-trustees of the Putnam Trust, which benefits two of our parishes. The lawyers for the trust company are forever changing one thing or another, mostly for tax planning purposes. Out of a stack of 100 pages, two of them required my signature. Gave the stack to Sue for scanning to our files and mailing the originals back to U.S. Trust.
  • Dispatched a handful of relatively small email-generated tasks.
  • Stopped by Twyford's BBQ, a truck-based business that was operating today about three blocks from the office. Picked up a pound of burnt ends and brought them home to eat for lunch. (Not the whole pound in one sitting, mind you.)
  • Planned and plotted the various individual tasks associated with giving the Lenten teaching series this year at St Paul's Cathedral. We're going to call it Peeling the Paschal Mystery.
  • Responded by email to a substantive liturgical question from one of our parish clergy as he plans for Holy Week.
  • Took a walk up Spring Street, around the north end of the state capitol, and back down Second. It was cold and windy, but within the window of doability.
  • Revised, edited, refined, and printed a working script of my homily for this Sunday. I'll be giving at as a guest preacher at the Church of the Holy Comforter in Drexel Hill, Pennsylvania, a Philadelphia suburb. This is a frosting-on-the-cake gig, as my original reason for going to Philadelphia was to attend the annual Mass and luncheon of the Society of King Charles the Martyr, of which I am a board member.
  • Evening Prayer in the cathedral.

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