The fourth Thursday of November was Thanksgiving; Canterbury
did not meet. The 1st and 2nd Thursdays and the 3rd
Friday we met, shared food, continued to plan upcoming events and discussed a
chapter in Timothy Keller’s Encounters
with Jesus: Unexpected Answers to Life’s Biggest Questions and the Bible
stories each chapter is based on.
This was the “winding down of the semester month,” so we had
no big events. One of our regular participants suddenly had required workshops
to attend every Thursday for her job and everyone is focused on the end of
classes and final exams, thus attendance was light. However, most of the group
participated in the first Spanish Eucharist at St. Alban’s and in the
Thanksgiving Eve Eucharist at Grace.
We began making plans for the spring semester and chose two
books from the “Embracing” series to study. The students chose “Embracing an
Adult Faith” by Marcus Borg and the chaplain chose “Embracing the Prophets” by
Walter Brueggemann because these kids don’t know enough about the Old
Testament!
We made additional plans for our trip to New Orleans in
January. We will all ride down together in a mini-van, which has been reserved.
Rosine is going with us and the students wanted to invite Chizi from Grambling
since they got acquainted with him at Convention. I will speak with Fr. Thomas.
In addition to our day at Annunciation working on the
playground, we will spend much of Monday with Fr. Walter Baer. We’ll begin with
Morning Prayer and breakfast with him, then all hop in the mini-van for a tour
of the city featuring Katrina’s devastation and post-Katrina changes. Fr. Baer
has a reputation as an excellent and knowledgeable tour guide and he will talk
with us about what it was like to minister in the city post-Katrina as his own
parish struggled to survive and he dealt with his own massive losses.
Two of students expressed interest in accompanying me to
Grayson for Evening Prayer with the group of Episcopalians working on become
the St. Michael the Archangel Mission Station, and we made plans for them to go
in December.
Respectfully submitted,
Archdeacon Bette J. Kauffman,
Ph.D.
Canterbury Chaplain
13 December 2014
