After breakfast, a three hour College planning meeting this morning, working mainly on designing a new integrated model for ministry training. It's gratifying to find that people engaged in ministry training from different angles find a common mind about the way forward. It's a positive way to start a lengthy painstaking process to create a learning process that will serve the church in response to changing times.
After lunch I drafted a rota to cover next term's chapel services, then celebrated the Eucharist in Welsh before the weekly tutor group meeting. Three members were away, two of them off sick. There's been a succession of student absences this term due to bugs of different kind doing the rounds, circulating not only in College but also in the wider community. Spring term is, in the recollection of staff past and present the time when both bodily immunity and morale seem to be at their lowest. I can't believe just how fortunate I've been so far, not catching one of the bugs, as I was often vulnerable in the past. Perhaps it's because I've been eating lots of fresh fruit every day since I returned from Sicily - our consumption of fruit has soared. Both of us seem to have developed an appetite for it. Curious.
I'm amazed at how much interest the news media are taking in the Papal election conclave. This afternoon I set my Twitter feed to receive news tweets with the conclave hashtag. It was fascinating to see what people all over the world were saying about the event being broadcast. Lots of silly and irreverent jokes, some prayers and expressions of good will, occasional political and polemical comments, also a surprising number of appreciations expressed about the prayerful seriousness of the occasion - such a contrast to worldly political elections. The Cardinals' singing the 'Veni Creator' in particular seemed to move people. Some expressions of prayer, on the right occasion, never seem to date or feel irrelevant. They speak to those familiar with them and to those for whom they are strange and new.
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