Gethsemani Retreat

Retreats have different styles from year to year. Some retreat leaders like to preside and preach at all the liturgies. Bishop Ed Price, our leader, wants us to take those roles and today Fr. Roy Stiles presided at our first liturgy together.
The food at the Abbey of Gethsemani is simple, prepared by the monks, but wonderful. The temptation is to take some of each offering–and eat too much.
Most of the day, and especially the meals, are in silence. We sit individually in a large dining room that has a wall of windows looking out on to a garden full of birds picking seeds from bird feeders.

Friends, for many years

I am back in the United States now but it would have been much simpler and easier to retire in Asia. The main reasons I returned to Louisville are my brothers and sisters and cousins and my friends. Today Donna and Nancy took me to dinner for my birthday. They were students in my class in high school and both have become significant actors in the deaf world. And remained my friends. They are the types of friends it is very difficult to find in another country, another language, another culture where we have almost nothing in common.

A long collaboration

Today we celebrated a memorial service for one of our Louisville priests who died. Archbishop Shelton Fabre presided. Next to him (on the left) was Deacon Dennis Nash whom I worked with in the 1970s when he was a high school student and I was running a youth group. We’ve been in contact over the years and it was great to see him now ministering to the People of God here.

Around Louisville

Part of my transition back to Louisville is getting acclimated to Cherokee Park. Through extremely visionary planning on the part of Louisville’s early leaders, a series of large urban parks was created here by Frederick Olmsted, the designer of Central Park in New York City. One of these is the 400-acre Cherokee Park on the east side of downtown. All of my early years were in the West End of Louisville and my years as a priest in the South End so I’m very unfamiliar with the maze of trails and paths in Cherokee Park which is near my home now. Today I took an exploratory bike ride to the park and ended up at the Daniel Boone statue, one of the park’s landmarks.