Now it was the Day of Preparation

Tess

The Sewanee Church Music Conference begins tomorrow. It's our first time meeting in person since 2019, and the usual family-reunion atmosphere will be all the more intense, all the more joyful, for our long absence from one another. Malcolm Archer will be our conductor, Fred Teardo our organist, and Barbara Crafton our chaplain. I will preside at some of the liturgies, but mostly I will rehearse and sing with the choir (the choir = everyone attending the conference), which is what I prefer.

As always I have headed up to Tennessee a bit early to spend time with my Mom and Dad, who live in Spring Hill, about thirty miles south of downtown Nashville and ninety miles northwest of Sewanee.

I haven't posted in quite a while because there hasn't really been much to talk about. I've been working hard on page proofs for Anselm: A Very Short Introduction and Anselm: The Complete Treatises with Selected Letters and Prayers and the Meditation on Human Redemption, both of which should be out this fall. But the only thing more boring than correcting page proofs is talking about correcting page proofs; it's hardly blog-worthy. I managed to get my old office at USF completely cleared out, a process one might have thought would evoke nostalgia but in fact produced only tedium.

I turned in my keys to the Key Shop on Tuesday, and that was that.

I've also been working through the various tasks in "onboarding" at Georgetown: I-9 paperwork, Title IX training, benefit elections, claiming the highly desired Firstname.Lastname@georgetown.edu email, even getting the dimensions of my new office so that I can plan out how I'm going to furnish it:

There hasn't been much in the way of new work, alas. In my down time at Sewanee -- I skip out on things that don't apply to me, such as conducting workshops and organ master classes -- I will be working on my syllabi for the fall as well as two promotion cases for scholars who (fortunately for them, less fortunately for me) have published a great deal of material that I need to read closely and comment on.

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"Be anxious for nothing," St Paul instructs us, from which one can clearly understand that I am to pay as little attention to General Convention as possible. I did tune in briefly to see whether the bishops would elect me to the General Board of Examining Chaplains. They did not: a disappointment but hardly a surprise, since I am not much known in the church beyond my own diocese. It was heartening that I got 34 votes!

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I hope to keep going with my Sewanee posts. Whether there will be anything here that anyone else will want to read, I don't know; but at least I will have a diary of a lively week of singing, learning, and fellowship to which I can return when I need it.

Henry Purcell, "Rejoice in the Lord alway"