Sunday 21 March 2021

Finding Your Place

NB. I discover I'd only saved this post as a draft, not published it!

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The PCC decided on Friday to resume public worship on Palm Sunday, a week today. When I did the newsletter delivery round that morning everyone I spoke to asked me when the church was reopening: one of our most faithful members positively begged me. ‘I need to be back in church!’ So I am working out how to celebrate the Triduum in a curtailed and Covid-compliant form: there won’t be a procession on Palm Sunday, and the Easter Vigil will be done by just me and Julie the sacristan and recorded. But there will be live-streamed Compline, and an Easter Messy Church via Zoom, and I will need to work out how (and whether) to do the Passion Service for families on Good Friday. There’ll be a booking system for the Easter services, as there was for Christmas though I will be very encouraged if we turn out to need it!

It strikes even me as contextually incongruous, this antique formulation of what I do, but in fact, the more I considered what to put on the census form today, the more it seemed like a reasonable and accurate summary. It would have been more pious to put something about Jesus, but harder to encapsulate in 120 characters or less. This is both open and precise, even if, to all intents and purposes, the bishop doesn’t take an obviously close interest in his share of the cure of souls here. It is, still, not a bad place to find oneself – physically and metaphorically.

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