That Was the Weekend that Was...

At the moment high-intensity "fixin'" continues in the kitchen just down the corridor from my office. Vestry meets tonight and I have yet to amend the agenda and write up the Rector's Report. Main agenda item will be the budget for this year. It's a good one, I think; I'm hoping that it will be approved without too much acrimony.

Saturday somehow evaporated on me...a meeting in the morning of about a half-dozen people trying to form a book group, some in the parish and some not...various proposals revealing what I hope is NOT a fatal incongruency of expectations and agendas...maybe because I was the only gurrrrrl at the table, I was very much aware of territoriality ploys...or thought I was. Anyhow in the upshot we gently declined to take on the 900 page theo-socio-philosophical masterwork. And opted for Rupert Shortt's anthology, God's Advocates: Christian Thinkers in Conversation. Somehow in the process I became the person-in-charge of getting the books. Also the person-in-charge of making coffee. Words fail me...

Then I had a very happy interview with a delightful couple planning to be married in August. The groom's my-uncle-the-priest will be asked to participate in the service. FINE by me.

And so, eventually, home. Yesterday was a marathon, though; two communion services in the morning; there was "time for healing prayer" at the second one, but no takers, good! I take it that that means everyone feels hale and hearty. Then a parishioner made a presentation on ecclesiological understandings arising out of the South African experience of the last hundred years, with reflections from St. Augustine on the "two cities." Then it was time to run, with communion kit and all, to a seniors' residence for the monthly service there with the usual half-dozen faithful ladies.

Trying to be efficient, I had packed "gear" for the final stop of the day, the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity city-wide service (of course, at a church on the opposite edge of the city!) at seven o'clock. Being "The Anglican" on the committee, and in the program, I went the High-and-Lifted-Up Evensong route: cassock, surplice, academic hood, tippet. The Protestant clergy all were in dark suits, fair enough (though a Geneva gown would not have been out of place); but to my dismay the Roman Catholic and the Ukrainian Catholic, who can usually be counted on for suitably flashy haberdashery, also opted for plain dark suits. So there we were. A long row of undertakers, and one old woman apparently channeling Archbishop Laud. Sigh.

Never mind, the service went well, the readers read audibly and with understanding, a working projector was pressed into service at the last minute, the turnout was gratifying, the praise band "didn't suck" (apologies for that highly technical musicological jargon), and the coffee afterward was just excellent. As might have been foreseen; when over half the congregants' names begin with "Van," somehow, good coffee is one of the givens, right? Or am I just profiling, here?

Back to the writing of reports...and some office-cleaning by way of R and R.