On the second evening of her visit, the Most Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori traveled to the western part of the diocese to Grace Episcopal Church in Paducah, where she preached at Evensong and participated in the second “Conversation with the Presiding Bishop.”

As she did throughout her weekend visits, the presiding bishop focused her message to those at Grace on the relational God whose image implores us to live in community. Somewhere between 300 and 400 attended.

During her sermon, she used images of desert flowers to illustrate her point that the "Trinity is really about relationships and community." Describing two plants in particular, she said they become "whole ecosystems" that sustain and attract other "sources of life that live there" (owls, lizard and woodpeckers for example) into "an interdependent life. When we talk about Trinity we are really about relationships and community. ... When we talk about a creator become human in Jesus, we're talking about God with us, who in God's own being models a relational community. That's why we baptize in the name of the Trinity.... It's important that we recognized deep down that when we welcome another, we acknowledge that we depend of each other and we will be forever changed."

The "Conversation with the Presiding Bishop" followed. Moderated by Donna Groves, news director of a Paducah FM radio station and a member of Grace, it lasted about an hour. Questions were asked that had been submitted in advance, including some the St. Matthew's forum the night before, as well as questions from the floor.

Of the questions submitted in advance, the first was a question from St. Francis in the Fields that had been asked Friday night regarding statements she has made that Jesus is "a way" or "our way" to God, rather than "the way." She was asked: "What answer do you have for those who ask, ‘why follow Jesus if God can act in other ways?' Also, besides a new career path, how has your life been transformed by Jesus?"

As she answered the question at St. Matthew's, Jefferts Schori responded to the question fully and thoughtfully, sharing her personal faith story as she did. Baptized in the Roman Catholic Church, she was raised in the Episcopal Church since age 9 and was active in the church through college. At college, however, she didn't find a "welcoming community" in college and began wrestling with questions between religion and science, she said. She came back during graduate school for two reasons, she said: the tragic loss of a childhood friend and his family killed in a plane crash he was piloting and a class she was taking about philosophy and science, where she found the great scientists like Einstein "wrestling and talking about mystery." She said that was her "orientation back into the community. I found a community of people who were very human, yet at the same embracing willing to put a 20 something neophyte to work in that congregation, willing to make a place with me, willing to wrestle with me in beginning to understand my faith as an adult."

She continued her study, not just of Christianity but also other world religions. "As I began to know people in those other traditions, I saw evidence of God at work," she said. "Now I understand that Jesus died for the whole world and I don't think most Christians, or many, would disagree with that. If Jesus died for the whole world and Jesus told his followers repeatedly, ‘Don't judge... That's God's job, not ours,' then I find it appropriate to say that God may be at work in other ways in this world. It's not my job to say to someone, ‘You will be going to hell because you don't approach God the same way that I do. I don't believe that's what Jesus was talking about. I think Jesus was talking about knowing God in an immensely present and intimate way as Abba, father, daddy. And I think that's what the mystics have told us in all of the centuries since: that we know God, as Julian says, closer than our clothing, as the very breath within us. That's all I'm worried about. I fully expect that God is working ways beyond my imagining, and God will sort out who is embraced at death."

The bulk of the questions, however, came from Grace members, and their topics ranged from her prayer life and vegetarianism to the future of the Episcopal Church. The forum indeed began with a question from the floor about her prayer life, asked by Julia Jaeger, who wanted know how she practices prayer, "especially in stressful times."

"My prayer life is centered in awareness, and being a fairly active person, I find it more useful and more productive to pray by getting outside and putting my body to work, occupying my body so that my spirit can be quiet: running, hiking, backpacking," she said. "If you have ever seen the people at the western wall in Jerusalem praying, they have a similar kind of understand that doing something with your body helps to quiet your spirit, chanting the psalms is a similar kind of task. The regularity of prayer life-that I find centrally important. Many, many other ways. I give thanks when I need to give thanks, most of the time... praying is part of studying for me.... I pray to God in many, many ways." She then humorously turned the question back, "I would like to ask the same question to you."

In response to a question about why she is a vegetarianism, she first clarified that she is "not a strict vegetarian" because she eats eggs, dairy and fish and then gave a two-part answer. In the 1970s, she said, she spent three weeks on a research vessel that had an "old navy cook" who fixed what he and the crew would eat. "That meant," she said, "that we had beef at breakfast, lunch and dinner everyday for three weeks. People were catching fish from the back of the ship, and he wouldn't cook them." The fish were frozen to be taken take home. "That's part of it," she laughed, then added more seriously that she also is aware of the environmental impact of the production of beef. "As a global community, we're going to have to eat lower on the food chain so that others simply my live. If you look at the contribution of carbons in the atmosphere that takes place from commercial production of beef and poultry, its' massive, massive. I don't want to tell everybody to be vegetarian... but I want to be conscious about how I live on this earth," she said.

Responding to questions about the future of the Episcopal Church, Jefferts Schori sees a church that "is going to look less and less like most of the people in this room. The growing parts of this society are immigrants, people of color, even in Kentucky. People are coming from Mexico and other places south. Asia. Three of the four people we baptized this morning were Chinese... We have to wake up to that. We have to recognize that the Episcopal Church is not going to just be Anglo. We have not done a good job of evangelism by reproduction, and there are important reasons for that... We're going to have to do our evangelism in other ways and again that means thinking outside the door."

Her suggestions for attracting new generations of Episcopalians included creative programs taking the church where young people are, whether skate parks or the local pubs or coffee shops. "Creative ways involves going out there and sitting in a pub and gathering them in a conversation, or at a coffee shop, to invite them to wrestle with their faith. Serving people doesn't necessarily mean you have to have a basketball program in the church. That could be useful but it's not the only way to do it."

The presiding bishop returned to Louisville that night on a plane owned by Ed Abell, a member of St. Thomas Church in Campbellsville, Ky., so she could share her message about the Trinitarian God of relationship and community to two more congregations, those attending the cathedral's morning service and those at a noon service at Resurrection Church. She also visited the Episcopal Church Home that afternoon to visit with residents and retired clergy.