Saturday, December 13, 2014

November Canterbury Report



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