On Saturday, February 6, 2010, our Lector Coordinator, Suzanne Austin, conducted a very successful Lector Enrichment Session at Padre Serra Parish, in the Conference Room.

In attendance were: Cisse Brown, Pat Chojnicki, Roy Farmer, Dave Flood, Linda Ford-McCaffrey, Gary Galles, Anne Hansen, Les Moore, Cynthia Nalevanko, Laurie Nichols and Betty Woodard.

We all very much enjoyed Suzanne's insights into the spirit of lectoring and how we can make the Word more meaningful to the people. There was a lot of participation from all in attendance, and we learned not only from Suzanne but also from one another.

We went from the Conference Room to the church for half the session, where all of us read from the same reading slated for that weekend. It was very instructional to us all to hear how each of us had our own way of making the reading reverent, explicit and meaningful. Suzanne added very insightful comments after each reading.

All in all - a very rewarding experience. Thank you, Suzanne, for helping us in our continuing quest to be more perfect lectors.

The other Lector Enrichment Sessions will be held at Padre Serra on Saturday, February 20 at 9:30 a.m. and Wednesday, March 3 at 7:00 p.m. If you haven't yet signed up, please call Suzanne ASAP at (805) 529-4523.

Below are some excerpts from Andrew Greeley's books that Suzanne read at the Enrichment Session. We all thought them very apropos!

"Why do Catholics like being Catholics?
It's the stories!

Religion is experience, image, and story before it is anything else and after it is everything else. Catholics like their heritage because it has great stories.

If one considers that for much of Christian history the population was illiterate and the clergy semiliterate and that authority was far away, one begins to understand that the heritage for most people most of the time was almost entirely story, ritual, ceremony, and, eventually, art. So it has been for most of human history. So it is, I suggest (and my data back me up), even today.

Catholicism has great stories because at the center of its heritage is 'sacramentalism,' the conviction that God discloses Himself in the objects and events and persons of ordinary life."

Andrew Greeley, "Furthermore"

"Every child, and the child in every one of us, is ready to plead, "Tell me a story."
For the role of stories is to explain life, and the good stories, in their very substance and in the structure of their language become revelation.
In the shattering, disturbing, confusing, and challenging parables of the Gospel we are confronted with 'one possible mode of being in the world: to live with explicit faith, with complete trust, with unqualified love.' The story asks us to consider the possibility that we can live a life of fundamental trust, confidence and total commitment to the goodness which has exploded out of the story and is seeking to take possession of us."

Andrew Greeley, "The Mary Myth"

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