After our fairly eventful and amazingly long trip (four hours in the Charlotte airport), by now we are well at home at St. Columba Conference Center in Northwest Memphis. We’ve been to church on Sunday (where Ellen saw one of the three people she knows in Memphis,) been swimming at the center a couple of times, experienced the National Civil Rights Museum and Beale St., prayed at night in our lodge and prayed in Elmwood Cemetery around the grave of the Martyrs of Memphis. We were disappointed in Mud Island, which claimed to be a water park and delighted at the water slide on the conference center property—home made.
All in all, memories are being made, community deepened (hard to think these kids could get to be better friends, but they are.) There are some challenges—heat indices of more than 100 degrees—high, high humidity with sun and temps in the 90s, the inevitable rub of personalities one against another. But pilgrimage does its work, and it certainly is doing that here.
We’re grateful for all the help getting here, and for the hospitality of this place. We are grateful for the kind folks of Memphis, who talk to us, laugh at us and instruct us, gently, with their thoughts about our voiced questions and strong opinions. Most of everyone’s spending money has been spent (for which the chaperones are grateful) and several of us are learning to cook. Parents, they are even cleaning up, without having to be reminded much!
There are, of course, many more stories to tell, but some of them, anyway are under the category of “What happens on pilgrimage stays on pilgrimage!” And in our hearts.
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