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March for Life 2008
By Fr. Dennis | January 24, 2008
I attended the March for Life in Washington DC this past Tuesday, and I had a great time. I flew up to DC on Friday so I could visit friends in the area and still have time to march with the Bishop Byrne High School kids from Memphis. On Saturday, I met up with and had dinner with Ashley and Lora, two people I met in the summer of 2005 when I was in Guatemala. They went on an excursion with me and another seminarian and some other Spanish students to the Mayan ruins of Tikal, and now they both live and work in Washington. It was great catching up with them.
Then on Sunday, I went to mass with and had lunch with my dad, who had been in Baltimore attending an annual soccer coaching convention. We met up with Dawn Eden, who took us to her church, Saint Stephen Martyr, in the Foggy Bottom neighborhood near George Washington University, where I heard the best regular parish choir I have ever heard. They did some of the most intricate polyphonic harmonies, they understood the proper rhythm of Gregorian chant, and they did all this on a regular Sunday of ordinary time.
Dawn will be meeting my Uncle Jim, my dad’s twin brother, tonight at a talk Dawn is doing in Beech Grove, Indiana.
Then at the march, I walked most of the way alongside my best friend from college, who is now the Dean of Everything-Not-Academic at St. Cecilia Academy in Nashville. The kids from St. Cecilia were very nice, and they had a good laugh when Mike told them that he and I met his wife on the same day back in 1984. I later remarked that this was the first time he and I had done anything like this since we participated in Hands Across America. Of course, Tuesday’s march was much more important than holding hands for the hungry event in 1986.
I’ll fill in hyperlinks to the various things I referenced later, and I have some pictures I want to put up next week. But today, I am about to travel some more. I am headed for Tulsa to attend the diaconal ordination of a classmate this Saturday. I expect to see Bill (commenter to this blog) there as well. He is the father of my goddaughter.
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January 27th, 2008 at 10:43 am
Glad we had lunch together…w/Dawn. What a wonderful, delightful, directed disciple of Christ. Of course, you are too… But to tackle the chasity problem of young girls, and guys, until marriage is such an uphill sales job. You can’t sell it if you don’t believe in it totally. If Dawn can get to the most influencial people in young people’s lives, their parents, and get them to sell it to their kids (even if they had a harder time with their own chasity a generation ago), the kids will eventually listen and come to celebrate themselves and the idea. I hope you had a great trip to the Deaconal Ordination in Tulsa. DAD
January 28th, 2008 at 9:03 pm
I just returned from Casa Maria, where the music was pretty terrific and Sr. Mary Anthony asked about you and told me to tell you hello. So, “Hello.”
AMDG,
Janet