St Bartholomew

  • Usual weekday AM routine. Morning Prayer in the cathedral.
  • Made a first prayerful pass at the readings for October 23. Normally, this would have been the ones for Proper 24. But I will be at St Luke's, Springfield on that day, the Sunday following St Luke's Day. So we will be observing their feast of title.
  • Inspected the inside of the diocesan garage. (Did you know we have a diocesan garage?) It's been on my to-do list for a while, so I finally did it. There certainly is an abundance of redundant and derelict yard care equipment there. It needs to be culled. I made some plans.
  • Met with the Dean over the proverbial "range of issues." And it was quite a range.
  • Read a letter that was waiting for me when I got back from vacation. It was not exactly a piece of fan mail. It's a good thing I have pretty thick skin, and decades of experience in ministry wherein people misunderstand me, project onto me all sorts of things I don't actually think and feel, and generally disabuse me of any illusion that I am universally liked and admired. I responded, trying to defer to the emotional parameters of my relationship with my correspondent and also speak authentically and truthfully. It was a balancing act, in which I may or may not have succeeded.
  • Attended Mass for the feast day in the cathedral chapel.
  • Lunch at home. Leftovers.
  • Found myself in the unenviable situation of trying to change two existing airline reservations. Under the current dispensation, they don't make it easy, and the gouge. Because they can. There's no use even getting angry about it. In the end, the job got done, but there were agonizing decisions to make, and it consumed an inordinate amount of time.
  • Communicated by email with a person in the ordination process about necessary educational plans.
  • Spent time with my homily for Proper 19 (September 16 at St Mary's, Robinson), taking it from "message statement" to the "developed outline" stage.
  • Prayer the Luminous Mysteries of the rosary.
  • Evening Prayer in the cathedral.

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