Sunday, April 29, 2012

Final Full Week

A return to routine today after yesterday's sensation of being plugged up: baking and biking and blogging. I am still standing, alert, on Saturday's point of seeing. My prayer is that God will give me the ears to hear the new words being spoken for me. I know God is saying something whose freshness will sock me (maybe shock me, too) once I can hear and decode the message. Something tells me the hearing will not happen here. I must go to where the signal is stronger. I must go to Kansas and California.

In the meantime, we turn the corner yet again, and we begin one more full lap of postulancy, the final week under our ordinary schedule of prayer, instruction, and ministry. One more day of catechism; one more day of Franciscan studies; then program evaluation. My last day at Neighbors Together is Friday; my site supervisors are guests at dinner on Tuesday at St. Michael Friary. In between these activities, there are a couple a few one-off events. We will work in one more vocation talk, this one on Monday evening in our neighborhood. We will attend the funeral of a major benefactor of the Province of St. Mary, much beloved by the friars, on Friday morning at St. Patrick's Cathedral in Manhattan. At week's end, on Saturday morning, we are heading to Yonkers for two items on the social calendar. First, a Mass of thanksgiving for a new children's hospital with Fr. Francis Gasparik, the provincial minister, who visited our friary last Thursday. Second, a Cinco de Mayo luncheon at Sacred Heart Friary in honor of the intrepid young postulants moving on to novitiate. It's an occasion for the professed friars to say their farewells to us, because they won't be seeing us for another fourteen months! Much as I do not wish to shortchange any brother who wants to bid me godspeed, I'll be excusing myself a little early from the luncheon. I'm meeting Jennifer and Nicholas at Junior's Restaurant in downtown Brooklyn in the mid-afternoon for an early dinner, followed by an excursion to the Brooklyn Museum for the free-admission arts and entertainment programs held on the first Saturday of the month.

Come next week, we'll be cleaning up, packing up, and moving out. Ten days and counting.

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