I notice how today is Bloomsday, the annual celebration of James Joyce’s novel of a day wandering around Dublin. Faithful readers are even now treking around the city to gawk at appropriate spots recounted in Ulysses. Bless ’em all.
Me, I’m in the midst of my own pilgrimage, focused on those awkward moments following one of the major markers of my leaving the ministry of the First Unitarian Society in Newton. The biggest will be on the 1st of August, when I’m no longer on Newton’s payroll and instead am actually the minister of the First Unitarian Church of Providence. But yesterday I preached my last sermon from Newton’s pulpit and we had a going away bash for me.
Today is the first day of a “terminal” vacation. Being church life the passing on will be a bit murky. I have two funeral services scheduled as well as two or three meetings over the next couple of weeks.
I awoke this morning at four thirty in the morning. I sat (as we say in the Zen tradition), then made some coffee and plopped myself in front of the computer and worked a bit on planning for next church year, then turned my attention to the houses we hope to look at in Providence next weekend.
Today I drive down to Providence to meet with the Director of Religious Education so we can do a little scheming and plotting.
I suspect it’s going to take a while to get used to the changes…
(As a total aside, I recommend a look at Donald Lopez’s little critique of David Brook’s column Neural Buddhists to which I provided a pointer a while back. As is often the case as he considers Buddhist modernism, Professor Lopez is not impressed…)
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