Time for Reflection

After Easter I often take a spiritual retreat with several of my clergy colleagues. Our usual retreat is the St. Joseph Abbey, north of New Orleans outside of Covington. St. Joseph Abbey is a Benedictine Monastery and while there, we enter into the cycle of the monks -- morning prayers, noon mass, evening vespers ... and silence! Do you have any idea how difficult silence is to maintain?

This year our retreat took us to Ponchatoula, LA to Rosaryville. Rosaryville is the original site that the Benedictines settled in the 1800s. However, they moved upstream to their present site and a group of nuns took over the retreat house at Rosaryville. I enjoyed the openness of the retreat. Without the cycle of the monks we were on our own. We were still to observe silence, but ... did I mention how hard that is?

The three days were gorgeous. I filled them with meditation, reading, art work, and of course, photography. I always find it hard to enter into the time and harder still to return to the world.

Images of my Reflection

Relay for Life

Tonight we celebrated life with our cancer survivors in Relay for Life. Our plan was to be at the high school stadium, but the weather ran us inside to the American Legion. It was surely nice to be inside and high and dry as the storm raged outside!

The evening began with the walk by the cancer survivors around the circle of luminarias decorated in memory and in honor of loved ones.

Dancing and margaritas (non-alcoholic, of course), rounded out the evening.

Relay for Life 2009

Easter Sunday Morning

Christ the Lord is risen today ... Alleluia!

Bubbles, Bubbles everywhere ...

These were taken at the Crawfish Boil. I love it when the bubbles come out!

Easter Crawfish Boil

It is hard to have Easter without Crawfish. We did it up right today! Friends, food, fun, and even the Easter Bunny ... life is good!

Life's a Beach in southwest Louisiana

Good Friday brings out the wanderlust in me and I often take to the open road. Today that road took me south as I ventured into Cameron Parish and Holly Beach, on around to Port Arthur, Texas, up through Bridge City and Orange, and back into Louisiana and home to Vinton. It was a beautiful day to travel the coastline.

The beaches were beautiful and surprising. I did not know that Louisiana had beaches like that. I enjoyed walking in the sand, picking up gorgeous sea shells and watching the birds swoop in and out. Kids and families were playing in the water and if I didn't turn around and look at the community, I could almost imagine that there was no storm damage.

At one point, while trying to photograph a group of brown pelicans I realized that I was no longer walking on sand; I was walking on tiny, tiny little sea shells -- millions of them. I had to get a picture of that, because I did not believe it myself.

The picture of the shells in my hand shows the size of those tiny, perfect crustaceans. The second picture shows the quantity of shells that were around the area. The Gulf picture just shows the utter beauty of the day.

It was a great day to be with God through his creation.