National Religious Vocation Conference

Well this weekend I am in Louisville, Kentucky for the National Religious Vocation Directors Conference. I arrived yesterday morning around 11 am and got settled in my room. After unpacking (which took only a couple minutes) I went downstairs, grabbed some lunch, and returned to the room to watch a bit of tv, eat lunch and wait for my friend Traci to pick me up. Traci is a Benedictine Sister from another community who I met about 10 years ago. We have stayed in contact through e mail but have not seen each other for many years. Traci lives here in town, so we decided to get together and catch up on each others life. After she picked me up, we had over an hour to chat as we drove up to her monastery which is in Indiana. It was wonderful reconnecting, praying vespers at a different monastery and getting a chance to share a meal with her community. What a great first day!

Today was the first day of the conference. The pre-conference I attended was on Young Adults in the Church and was presented by a sociologist. It had a lot of facts and statistics and was very informative and very enjoyable. This evening the Conference itself started. It began with choir rehearsal for tonight's opening and for mass tomorrow. I was pleasantly surprised to see Janet Whitaker was the choir director. Janet was at the Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley when I was at Franciscan School of Theology in Berkeley. We were in some classes together and I loved her voice and the music she wrote. While at school, I was also blessed with singing with her on several occasion. It was wonderful seeing her and singing with her again this evening. She wrote an amazing piece for the conference!

The opening session was beautifully done. After the welcome by both the NRVC office and the Archbishop, the planning committee performed a skit. Then we had 6 local lay people share reflections on what religious have meant in their lives. Between each speaker, the choir sang the refrain Janet wrote for the Conference. It was very powerful. The opening ended with a barbershop quartet performing for the large group. They were fantastic! As we all prepared to leave, suddenly we had the trumpeter from the Kentucky Derby trumpet us into an evening gathering. It was so cool!

So as you can see - the Conference has gotten off to a wonderful start and there is so much yet to come. I will try to post photos tomorrow.