Wednesday

  • Task planning and blog reading over breakfast.
  • Morning Prayer in the cathedral.
  • Attended to some business pertaining to my membership on the diocesan Board of Trustees, which oversees the invested funds of the diocese.
  • Sent an email aimed toward re-homing an electronic organ from one of our closed churches that has been sitting in my home not getting used. Hoping to prevent it ending up in the landfill.
  • Substantive pastoral phone conversation with one of our clergy who is undergoing a quite serious personal crisis. 
  • Took care of some administrative issues pertaining to one of our seminarians and arranged for funds from my discretionary account to assist some of our clergy in attending a conference.
  • Worked on my homily for Proper 18, to be delivered on September 9 at my DEPO parish in Yazoo City, MS. Brought it from the "message statement" stage to a "developed outline."
  • Lunch from Wing Stop (a recent discovery), eaten at home.
  • Had an appointment with my psychotherapist. Healthy mind, integrated feelings ... you know the drill.
  • Met with the Communications Coordinator, inching toward a replacement for Gnosis, our cumbersome database system. More than "inching," actually. There's been some good progress.
  • Attended to an ongoing and somewhat vexatious pastoral-administrative quagmire (that's how I experience it, at any rate) in one of our Eucharistic Communities.
  • Worked on my homily for Proper 17 (September 2 at St Andrew's, Edwardsville), reworking a text from the same occasion several years ago for redeployment this year. Sometimes that works and sometimes it doesn't.
  • Read and filed an unsolicited résumé from an ordinand in another diocese.
  • Responded by email to a letter from a couple of communcants in the diocese taking me to task for something I wrote. I hope they found my reply conciliatory. That's how I meant it.
  • Evening Prayer in the cathedral.

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