New York City!

Hi everyone, this is Will. Here are a few pictures from our New York City trip. Enjoy : )

This is the apartment we stayed in while we were in Manhattan.

Central Park(ers)

We got to see Adriana Zabala and her new daughter, Valentine (Val-en-teen)

Later that day, we met up with my mom's friend, Mia Dillon, and saw the New York Philharmonic Orchestra play in Central Park. We enjoyed the free concert and fireworks with about 60,000 of our closest friends.

Our friend, Pieter, moved to Pennsylvania a couple months ago.
He and his mom drove up to the city to visit us. It was great to see him again.

We went to visit my mom's aunt, Janet, who lives in Pennsylvania.

The house, Pond Hole, in the background is where she lives.
We were there a day and a night before returning back to NYC.

That's the Brooklyn Bridge in the background,
and two familiar looking folks over there on the right.

These are my parents friends and their son: Jeanne, Fred, and Freddy.
They are letting us stay in their apartment in Brooklyn while they vacation in Europe. : )

I hope everyone has a great summer, see you when we get back!

Quiet now, but that will soon change

I’ve not posted another blog entry, basically because we don’t have much exciting to report. Liz and I had a quiet and productive week in the lakeside cabin at Camp Allen in the 2nd week of June and accomplished a lot of reading. Since we returned to Lake Jackson, we’ve continued our reading and note-taking, dealt further with our house and yard, and seemed to have made a lot of appointments with doctors, dentists, orthodontists, optometrists, etc. It’s great to have time these days for prayer, meditation, exercise and nap-taking. We considered adding photos to this blog entry, but snapping a picture of Liz reading and a picture of Andy reading didn’t seem worth the trouble.

Ben and Will are counseling for several weeks at Camp Allen and Will led the worship for the junior high mission trip to Houston with Josh Orsak and St. Thomas, Nassau Bay two weeks ago.

I spent two even quieter days basically as a hermit in someone’s home in the country. There, in addition to my studies, I actually managed to write two poems one morning. In late June, Liz and I went to Houston for a couple of days, so that I could give the invocation for the swearing-in of the new President of the State Bar of Texas, Harper Estes. Harper and I have been good friends since we were boys in Lubbock. At the President’s Gala, Liz and I danced for the first time in a non-church setting in about 10 years—not that we danced any differently!

Just last weekend, all five of us, plus my parents, went to see my brother Kevin and his family in Houston for a few days, to celebrate the 4th of the July and what the Parker s call our Aggregate Birthday Party.

This week, Ben and Will are counseling at camp again, Caleb is bored, and Liz and I are continuing our house-and-sabbatical work. (Right now, I’m actually waiting to get feeling back in my mouth after a long session in the dentist’s chair.) And we are ramping up preparation and plans for our Big Trip, which begins Sunday. All of us are flying to New York City for two weeks. We’ll take a train from there to Boston, where the boys will take part in St. Timothy’s mission trip. Liz and I will fly from Boston to Santa Fe, New Mexico to attend the Glen Workshop, sponsored by Image, a journal of Christianity and the arts. During the mornings at the Glen, Liz will be taking a drawing workshop and I’ll be taking a poetry writing workshop. The afternoons and evenings will be filled with lectures, readings, worship, and visual arts presentations. If you’re interested, you can learn more about the Glen at:

http://imagejournal.org/page/events/the-glen-workshop/glen-workshop-2008/

So, the next time you hear from me on this blog, I should have more to say—and even some photographs!

~ Andy

Sabbatical: the First Week

And a great week it has been! The highlight certainly was Will Parker's graduation from Brazoswood High School on Saturday, May 31. We were delighted to be joined for the festivities by my brother and his wife from Houston (Kevin & Renee) and by Will's godfather from Fort Worth, Bishop Sam Hulsey. The next day, Liz, Caleb, Bishop Hulsey and I drove up to Trinity Episcopal Church in downtown Houston for their 12:30 p.m. Jazz Eucharist...a wonderful treat, though I did find myself thinking about and praying for you all at St. Timothy's as you worshiped with Margaret Quill. At Trinity Church we ran into Carol Barnwell, the Editor of the Texas Episcoplian, and walked with her to the funky Tacos a Go-Go for lunch. Bishop Hulsey then headed for the airport and Liz and I took Caleb to Jazz Camp at Camp Allen. A pretty jazzy day, that.

(By the way, if you're wondering why I dressed down so much for graduation in the photo above, just ask Will!)

This week has been devoted to decompressing from Graduation and from nearly 20 years of active ministry, i.e., taking it easy, dabbling in yard work and housework, reading, paying bills and the like. I had to give up nearly an entire day to fixing our home e-mail and spent nearly half a day investigating and ordering laptops computers for Liz and me. These will be especially helpful for our sabbatical work. On Wednesday, we packed Ben off for a trip with a friend and his mom to Philadelphia to look at colleges in the Northeast. Today (Saturday, June 7) Liz and Caleb will accompany Will to Camp Allen, where he will work as a Resident Cabin Counselor for the next two weeks. Caleb begins his camp on Sunday and Liz and I will spend the week there as chaplains, staying in one of the lakeside cabins with Ben. I'm staying behind in Lake Jackson so as to be here when Ben returns Sunday evening from Philly. Then on Monday the two of us will drive up.

Our intent is to post a report on this blog about once a week, so that you all can keep up with us a bit. Since we don't anticipate having internet access at Camp Allen, our next entry probably won't appear until the week of June 15.

For my sabbatical topic, Poetry as a Pathway for Spiritual Growth in the Congregation, I've just started reading The Poetic Imagination: An Anglican Spiritual Tradition. The author, L. William Countryman, the New Testament professor at our seminary in Berkeley, California, purports that English lyric poetry has proved to be a particularly suitable medium for communicating the genius of Anglicanism. A promising book, so far.

So, all in all, this week has been a gentle and fitting initiation into the sabbatical. Hoping and praying that the people of St. Timothy's have also made a good beginning!

~ Andy