Quiet Weekend at Loyola House

It's hard to belive that it's already Sunday evening...where has the week gone?

Sadly, Adam's grandfather passed away this week. On Thursday, several novices drove down to Cleveland to attend the funeral mass/burial. I was honored to be invited to play a slow-aire for the mass. I could not attend the burial services as I had to turn around and drive out to Chicago for my CPE interview.

Without going into too much detail, I am now officially accepted for the Clinical Pastoral Education program at Loyola University Medical Center. I met a number of the other chaplains and residents and I'm so excited to have this opportunity. My goals are many, but I really want to cultivate an ever-present disposition of attention, reverence, and devotion. That is, I hope to be attentive to God's presence in the life of the person with whom I am dealing, I want to reverence that person as being a bearer of God, and then be devoted to that person in order that I might companion that person in his or her unfolding awareness of how God is working in his or her life. I also want to work on empathy skill that will make me more of an affective/effective listener.

I went to see Harry Potter on Friday night (after driving with reckless abandon in order to make it back to Loyola House). I liked it. I'd say that the character development was a bit dodgy, but I can't complain too much as it's a movie that attempts to condense several hundred pages of writing into a 2.5 hour movie. Besides, I'm not looking for it win an Oscar; it is what it is: Mind Candy.

The rest of my weekend seems to have been spent in the kitchen. I made steak for dinner on Saturday and Denis and I made pork roast tonight. Now my eyes turn toward Thanksgiving dinner, which ought to be quite the culinary event.

This week will be pretty nutsy. I'm going to play the Oireachtas in Columbus, so I leave Thursday evening and return Monday morning. It'll be nice to be away from the house and to re-connect with the Irish dancing world.

Apart from this, there's not much Jesuit stuff to talk about. I think I'm going to go out for a walk and then come back to watch our videotaped episode of Smallville.

Happy Belated Birthday to Mike English who turned 16 this last week (November 15th). I remember my 16th birthday very well: I didn't get a car. I don't expect that Mike got one, either.