It has been quite a week, and the coming month is lining up to continue the same course. Perhaps it has been too busy. I’m tired, the house needs cleaning. People are around me are sick and need caring for. I even forgot that I was supposed to read the second lesson in Church this morning, something I enjoy doing, but it completely slipped my attention.

I have not followed the Pope’s visit as closely as I would like. I haven’t really written about it or shared about it online. I did mention it in my post about Speaker Boehner, but that is about it.

Friday and Saturday, I was at the CT Health Foundation’s All Fellow’s Retreat. I got a lot out of it and came out renewed and energized in the battle for health equity. I hope to write more about that soon. Yet that also, perhaps, contributes to my fatigue.

Church today, despite my failure, was especially moving. It seemed as if God was very present, as if God’s spirit was moving through the church the whole day. The sermon started off with our Seminarian talking about when the KKK burned a cross on her grandparent’s front lawn, or people talking about the darkness of her skin. I don’t have words to describe my feelings about receiving communion, the small piece of bread the seminarian placed in my hands with a smile and the sip of wine from the common cup shared by the senior warden. God was there.

At coffee hour, I spoke with a visitor from England who had recently become Assistant Curate of a church there. He came to the priesthood later on in his life journey and he spoke fondly of the encouragement he had received from a priest that is now retired, attending the church I attend, and is now sharing encouragement with me.

We spoke about our different journeys. I mentioned my interest in the Camino de Santiago as a metaphor for each of our live changing journeys. He wished me a good Camino and my eyes welled up a little as we shook hands and headed our different directions. I knew him as a fellow traveler.

Then, it was downstairs for an event I have been waiting for, longing for. After the shooting in Charleston, our Priest announced that in the fall, we would have a parish discussion about racism. The first of these discussions was to take place this morning. How would the discussion go? How many people would attend?

I would have liked to have seen more people attend the discussion. I would have liked to see us cover more ground, but what was covered was very meaningful, very powerful, very important. It probably reflects my own impatience. This is such an important topic to tackle. We will have the second part of the discussion next week, and we shall see where things go after that.

When I did get home, I took a nap. Later, I read, again, some of an email I received from the Dean of Formation for the Diocese of Connecticut. I had met with her this past week, to get ideas for continuing my own education. It seems like several of the options that looked so promising initially, pale on closer examination. Some may yet turn out to be incredibly valuable. Others, perhaps not so much.

One of the Canonical areas of study for those seeking ordination in the Episcopal Church is “Christian Theology, including Missionary Theology and Missiology.” As I read through the areas, this one has jumped out at me, and I asked the Dean of Formation specifically about materials in this area.

One name that keeps popping up, as I read through some of the recent recommendations from the Dean is Alan Roxbough. I searched for material of his that might be online, and found a bunch of interesting things. On the Facebook page, The Missional Network, was a link to Christ and Pop Culture, Living Local with Slavoj Žižek. I’ve been looking for people talking about writers like Slavoj Žižek and Christianity. As I explored deeper, I lost track of where I found that link and did a Google Search on Zizek and Missional and also came up with Zizek, the Space In-Between, and Mission. It is worth noting that this blog post links back to Roxburgh and The Missional Network.

Lots of stuff to explore here. Looking more closely at The Missional Network page, I find some interesting pages such as WHY LEARNING COMMUNITIES?

So, where is the learning community around a culturally informed missionary theology?

As a final part of today’s checkpoint, I watched some of the Pope’s mass in Philadelphia, dealt with a social media issue at work, and took a peak at the super moon, before the eclipse starts.

It has been a long checkpoint, but it kind of reflects what has been going on with me, as well as setting up some of what is coming for October.