Wednesday Update

Dr. H. responded to an email yesterday:

"Remember to keep it simple. Make it simple.

This is great: (the thinking is “you can do this, just finish the damn thing so you can move on to the liturgy stuff.”

Finishing is the goal; not doing it thoroughly but simply."

Later on in the evening talked to Dr. H. on the phone - it was suggested:

1) having pizza was too much carbs will make it harder to think/work, need more protein and

2) I was too sleep deprived. Should consider just going to bed. Hard to think/work without enough sleep, easier to find self going in circles, also not good self care to run self into the ground.


Sleep = good suggestion. Feeling better. :) Got up with just enough time to get ready and leave for semester eval with field ed supervising priest (M+ , not to be confused with my male friend M back home). That went okay, we had a good chat.

Some stuff we talked about ties into stuff I've been working on with psychologist.

M+ recommends my trying to limit research/preparation (i.e. when teaching & preaching) because in a parish you don't have the same time to do it if you are teaching a class, preaching on Sunday and have a homily on Wednesday - like you might have if you were writing 3 seminary assignments. What people get from it is not necessarily proportional to time invested - diminishing returns after a certain point. So if you work 5 hours on something, working 5 more hours might only add a teeny bit to what people learn or how they receive it - so is it worth the extra time?

M+ also said based on what he knows of me and my personality he encourages me to work toward a "conversational" approach to preaching and teaching (also happens to be M+'s approach). Said this approach is relational, can be influenced by interactions with parishioners and often works better with folks than trying to lecture in class or "preach" anyway. It seems to M+ it's already part of who I am, so I should develop it. Said when preaching imagine someone came up to me at coffee hour and asked a question, what do I say? How do I converse with them? One way to be more conversational in a sermon is to ask a question and pause there, for folks to respond.

We met for quite a while, so these are only 2 of the things we discussed. Also talked some with S+ afterward. S+ tried to change my mind about Contemplative prayer. Following our discussion I have a better grasp of what it's really supposed to be which might work a little better for me than how others have tried to teach/explain it. But even with that, the way it was described made me feel it was likely to make me want to jump out of my skin, but tried to be open and courteous to what S+ was saying. I see it's value and would recommend it to others, but the jury is out on how often it will be part of my prayer life in the future.

I was enjoying being out and about, so I picked up a few things at the grocery store. Got home - email from a classmate, did I set up my template for GOE answers yet (strict guidelines)? She knows I worked as a word processor. Maybe I should have been working on Ethics or Liturgy, but decided to set up my GOE shell.

Resulted in 3 templates: blank, simple explanation, and detailed explanation. I only needed the blank, the others were mostly for friend's benefit. Detailed because she is stressing over GOEs and my template is kind of advanced. I use styles I create for headings, body, quotes, references, etc. I don't think the general public uses them much, they format manually. Sent docs to her when I was done. At least that is done.

Having lunch with my Advisor tomorrow to discuss Senior Eval.

5:00 pm so I need to:

1) eat - did I really only eat 2 gingersnap cookies at the church all day? Not good. No wonder I've lost 8 pounds on meds.

2) try to work on assignments now that I've had sleep and a long break.

I can hear the mantra: protein and simplify. :)