Tuesday (John Donne)

After the usual preliminaries, the working day began with Canon Evans and I emailing and phone-calling in an effort to get a diocesan Zoom account established. It felt like the blind leading the blind at moments, as we found ourselves in a sort of bureaucratic traffic circle without any clear exit strategy. Time along will reveal how productive our efforts were. I then got to work on an Ad Clerum (letter to "in-charge" clergy) about how we "do" Holy Week and Easter under present conditions. (Operating in the background of all this, of course, is grief and anxiety over those same "present conditions" and what it's doing to our social fabric and our souls and multiple levels.) With a break for lunch, this effort took me to the mid-afternoon. Ran an errand to a doctor's office to pick something up (observing all prudent protocols). Worked out on the Bowflex (which I should be doing anyway, but right now it's my surrogate for walking). Wrote emails to clergy with nodal events in April and scheduled them to be sent at the appropriate times. (With the retirement of a part-time staff member who used to prepare and organize my note cards and envelopes so I could hand-write these message, I've moved to an electronic format. In any case, my handwriting was getting less and less legible, so it's probably a good thing.) Evening Prayer with Brenda. After supper, I did some refurbishing work on a "vintage" sermon text for Maundy Thursday.