Jenny's Birthday Adventure

Lucky me, my birthday happened to fall on a Saturday this year and so we all decided to spend this particular community day by taking a pilgrimage to Walsingham! So last weekend, we fired up the minibus yet again and piled in for a fun-filled day...

My Classmates decorated for me!

First stop...Cambridge to pick up Fr. Matthew. Since we left at 6am we missed the traffic and had some time to enjoy an early morning coffee.

Father took for a us walk around Clare College and some of us had to have a closer look at the beautiful gardens.

Upon arriving back at our mode of transportation, we notice that something's not quite right.

Yep, it's a flat tyre... But luckily we have Fr. Matthew, Marcus and Ambrose on the job!

After a stop at a tyre shop and a quick loo break at Blackfriars, we were on the road again! This was definitely a memorable birthday. Thanks to my lovely community for taking it all in strides and keeping their joy, no matter what.

On the road again...

We've been putting a lot of miles on the mini-bus lately! One Saturday we went up to Reading with Fr. Alexander to see Mapledurham, which has a rich Catholic history. It hid many priests during the Reformation and even housed priests from Douai, France during the French Revolution. Ambrose, Father's dog, even got to come along!

The next weekend we drove out to see the students at Fisher House, the Catholic Chaplaincy at Cambridge. The weather was beautiful and we were invited to join the students for Mass and lunch on the terrace. Anthony, who's a graduate from Cambridge, along with his sister, a current student, gave us an insiders tour of this amazing university. Thanks also to all the students who managed to get us into the different colleges!

The next day we again piled into that poor mini-bus and drove it all the way up to Birmingham for the day. There we popped in at the University of Birmingham's Newman House to talk about the school. We also got a tour of the Maryvale Institute since our Catechism course is through them and stayed to say evening prayer with the Bridgettine Sisters. Luckily, with the bank holiday, the traffic wasn't too bad on the drive home that night.

With all this traveling, we were happy to leave the mini-bus parked in Soho Square for our last Saturday outing and just remain in London for the Pentecost Festival.

Visitors from Cambridge

On Friday we were delighted to host some guests from Cambridge. Sr Valery, OP came to visit along with some students from Fisher House, the Catholic chaplaincy in Cambridge.

They had come to find out about our life at the school, particular our approach to street evangelisation. We delivered an informal presentation on what we've learned about evangelisation since coming to SPES and how we try and put it into practice on Friday nights (and all of the rest of the time too really!) I hope to summarise some of what we said in a later post.

Then Sr Valery and the students joined us on the streets to experience street evangelisation first hand!

On Saturday morning we had a leisurely breakfast together and got to chat some more. We'll hopefully be paying a return visit to Cambridge later in the year for one of our community outing days.