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Posted: January 16
(Rome) During the homily on Sunday's Mass, I spoke about how quickly we have moved this year from the holiday season to ordinary time. Community life has its own markers for this progression, just as the liturgical year marks the change of seasons. Christmas is a quiet time here at the Curia. Although there are big crowds just outside the door going and coming from the Piazza San Pietro with its life-sized crypt and enormous Christmas tree, inside the community shrinks as many Jesuits go back to their provinces. That was especially true this year with many provinces having congregations to elect men to come to the general congregation which will already be in its second week by this time next year. So our dining room was half-empty and the halls much quieter. Now that we are back in ordinary time, people are in the normal rhythm of coming and going. For two weeks we have all of the novice directors from the East Asia and Oceania assistancy staying with us while they attend a spirituality program. Conversation at table broadens as they bring their frame of reference from the countries where they work, be it China, the Philippines, Korea, Japan, Indonesia or even Australia.
Work also falls into ordinary time. Since I have to prepare things for the general congregation, I am doing less travel and spending more time at my desk preparing the web pages that we will use as a tool for preparing for the congregation as well as for distributing documents during it. If I can save a forest or two by getting people to use digital means rather than laser printing everything, all the better. We are also finalyzing the redesign of sjweb. It is a long process that started last year during the European web masters' conference that we had in Rome. Several presentations got me thinking about how we could improve the site. Take my advice: if you don't want a lot of work, don't even dream of wondering how you can improve your web site. The end result is looking very good, though. The site has continued to evolve, as have most of the province web sites that I have seen. I would welcome feedback on the new design; you can take a look at it at the following address: http://212.34.242.179 which we will use until we officially switch over from the old pages to the new ones. You can give me helpful feedback by clicking on the Contact Us link on the home page. Proofing and improving the pages of this new design seems like very ordinary work, but hopefully the end result will be worth all the attention to detail.
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