Virtual Reality and the Real

Many clergy confined to vicarages or just unable to meet their parishioners as they usually would are taking to livestreaming private masses and Compline and recitals of the Office. I am so far sparing the good people of Swanvale Halt the same. When I say the Office on my own I make so many mistakes I wouldn't want anyone to share it. Today I discovered at Evening Prayer that at Morning Prayer I'd read the Lectionary wrong and used the bits and pieces for Saturday's observance of Bd Thomas Cranmer (hem-hem) instead of St Cuthbert, as it should have been. Wrong psalm, the lot. I'm experimenting with recording something in the audio field, though, replacing our weekly newsletter and Sunday mass with a read version which I can send out by email and pop on the website (a podcast!!). 

The rhythm of Christian prayer affects not just the day, or the week, but the whole year. Holy Week and Easter will be very strange in 2020, etiolated and wan, a dim flickering light instead of the climactic outburst of joy which it should be. But then it has been that before, in different times and places, if not for us these last decades. Anything we can do to tend that flame is worthwhile.

It's not just the Church, of course. I was invited yesterday to a virtual Goth club being run by a German DJ, although I only made it through the door for the last two tracks; it'll be run again next week, all being well. It's called Isolation. 

I benefit from my garden, as I've said. This afternoon I went on a journey of five circuits as the wind strafed across the mossy grass, through the arch with the vine waiting to bud, past the Shrine of Bacchus and round by Melpomene and the Grotto, then up the path overlooked by the Philosopher's Seat, past the Armillary Sphere by the little area of woodland, across the main lawn with its damson and apple tree and the Temple of Reason to one side, skirting the Maze and into the little dell which the eucalyptus used to shade, and down the steps by the pond and Diana the Huntress to the start again. Right down near the front of the house, below the Secret Garden and Lady Julia's Bower, I found these lovely violets just poking above the soil. This is where the cats normally come and poo so I hope the little blighters have found somewhere else.