Praying well and looking good

We had a brain storming meeting at Hinsley Hall today to plan for the School of Prayer next year. This is a two-day event which the diocesan Vicariate for Evangelisation runs at Leeds Trinity: the Friday session is for teachers, the Saturday session is for everybody else. It has worked well over the last four years. The 2013 School is to run on 1st and 2nd February and the workshops are provisionally as follows: the prayer of faith and Youcat; gesture and movement in the Dominican tradition of prayer; Eucharistic spirituality; and meditating upon the Angelus. I'm looking forward to it already. I'd book straightaway if I were you: http://www.dioceseofleeds.org.uk/evangelisation . Here's Linda Pennington, the diocesan Coordinator for Catechesis, who led us in the discussion.

Afterwards I returned to Leeds Trinity for a photo shoot. They didn't train us for this at seminary. We are going to have a panel put up on the wall of the Chaplaincy Landing with a picture of students discussing YouCat and next to it Pope Benedict's words: "There is nothing more beautiful than to know Christ and to speak to others of our friendship with him." I hope that it will be up in time for our forthcoming conference on the New Evangelisation because, frankly, it'll make the Chaplaincy look "of the moment." We had a proper YouCat session beginning with a prayer, and then discussed Paragraph 153, "The Resurrection of the Body" while Tania Clarke, our ever-helpful Marketing and Communications Manager, caught it all on film. The students' comments were as insightful and probing as ever: will we look like we do now?; will we have a relationship to everybody in every generation?; how can I not have a special love for my husband and children in heaven, a love which is greater than my love for others? Because the discussion was in a public place rather than in my flat, it became an act of witness in itself. We'll hold our YouCat sessions there from now on. I hope that I look friendly but authoritative on the picture.