Virginia Bemis working toward becoming a Spiritual Director

Virginia Bemis has just completed the first year of a two-year licensing program in spiritual direction at John Carroll University in Cleveland. She will begin her second year in September. After certification, she plans on starting a spiritual direction practice.

Virginia describes spiritual direction as

training to listen to what God is saying in your life. It's growing your prayer life. It's discovering yourself and how you related to God. It's not psychotherapy, and it's not being told what to do. Instead, you start on a journey, along with a guide, to find out more about how you and God speak to each other at this point in your life. This guide is known as a spiritual director and is sometimes described as a personal trainer for your spiritual life.

The first year of the licensing program consisted of theological study, including the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius of Loyola. The second year will combine theological study with internship. Virginia will work with directees under the guidance of an experienced supervisor, and will then be eligible for certification.

The University offers the licensing program through its Institute of Ignatian Spirituality.

Website not down

Apparently, Google has been refusing to index our church's main website for some time now. (I don't often search for the name of our church, but I should.)

The church and the website are still going, and I have cut the site down to very simple content in hopes that I can get back in Google's good graces, which is why you will not see any pictures or much of anything else fancy there. The bad news is that Google typically takes six weeks to index a site, so if my fixes didn't work, I will not know until the end of October. And if the site still has problems, there is no really good way to find out. The good news is that people do keep finding out Facebook page and the church website will appear if they follow the link.

If you want to see what the new (and very simple) home page looks like, just follow the link to St. Matthew's home page.

Later news:

The church site might have been hacked. Google simply refused to do anything with us, so I went through all the arcane little items and deleted the ones that didn't make any sense. Miracle! Google now can see the site!

We might have some action in the near future!

Still later news (September 9):

Aside from the hacking, another problem with the website is that I used fairly old-fashioned web code to do such things as inserting pictures and specifying where things would actually appear. Google did not love me for that. The home page is now done according to the new style, and the three following pages will soon be revised too.

If you type "Church Ashland Ohio" into Google, we are now on the third page of results. (Too far down in my opinion, but we are getting closer!)

Home from the hospital

William Bates (Mary Jo's dad) and Kasey Donnovan both hope to come home from Kingston next week. I'm sure they both would appreciate a card.