Wednesday again...

A pleasant sort of a day, mainly at home -- after going in to celebrate the eucharist, and then lead the book study with the Wednesday ladies, and then bolting across town to an ecumenical executive meeting...emails let us down and we had not-quite-a-quorum, but enough to make a practicable plan for our next steps. And good coffee of a Netherlandish intensity, and sugar cookies alongside.

Home and some reading -- made some purchases for St. Curious, bought insect repellent, made some financial plans (short-term), completed the laundry, with just a small basketful of flat ironing to do in the morning.

And then my ambition kind of petered out. But somewhere in there I finished Charlotte Bronte, Shirley, which I've found a delight for its depiction of the collisions between the heroines and the particular personalities of the clergy. I infer that Charlotte Bronte was not impressed when her father's curates "dissed" Yorkshire customs and manners.

I have a bundle of periodical reading here also -- and a little chapbook from Ursula Le Guin, The Wild Girls, with an essay on reading and an essay on modesty, both of which are eminently quotable.

Fred McMurray and Joan Crawford on the TCM channel in Above Suspicion, which was a great book; and they're always fun to watch, but I think I am just too sleepy tonight.

a highly-caffeinated Wednesday...

Wednesday is a regular 1/2 day at St. Curious, but yesterday ran above and beyond. Normally we have a midweek Eucharist followed by a Bible study, or book study, or wide-ranging conversation, with the Wise Wednesday Women. Fab Boss and I usually take it in turn to celebrate at the Eucharist -- yesterday we changed horses in midstream because she wasn't feeling well.

Spent a happy hour or so with the ladies catching up on how we all were, and then looking at some variations on praying with rosaries, prayer beads, prayer ropes, and so forth. Some discussion of the Marian mysteries. It was all smooth until we got to the last two Glorious Mysteries: the Assumption, and the Coronation. Stern beady-eyed confrontation with WWW: "Are those two IN THE BIBLE?????" And much laughter thereat.

Then a very brisk five block walk to Campus Watering-Hole to meet #1 Son and celebrate his birthday over a tasty lunch. Not just any birthday, but a Big Round Number birthday. Oog. Some serious conversation about future plans -- concrete ones. We'll continue celebrating tomorrow night with sibs'n'spouses, dinner in the Family Abode, here, aka Tether's End.

What to cook, what to cook. I had a brief fantasy of replicating the menu that Her Majesty gave the Obamas, but I ran aground, mentally, on the Sauce Nantua. Mine would have to be a cheap-o knock-off made with mere shrimp butter, I think. Better just to give it up altogether then? But still thinking about the possibility of multiple courses -- maybe a cold soup, a salad, and a roast or chops or something. Still brooding on that one.

However! back to Wednesday. Brisk walk back to St. Curious to collect Harriet-the-Echo, and hurl myself across the city (including across the RIVER) to Monastic Establishment for a session of local Anglican-Roman Catholic dialogue. The hospitable Monastic Persons entertained the group to dinner following our dialogue session. Sometime, somehow, I'd like to get a detailed look at them-there vows of poverty, I must say. It was a faint-dead-away menu. The Queen should be so lucky. We had roast lamb in profusion with more doo-dahs on it than I can remember or even identify but prominent among them were PINE NUTS...and all sorts of vegetable accoutrements variously roasted and caramelized and uniformly delicious. And for dessert -- does the term "frangipane" ring any bells out there? If not, just think "marzipan pie".

Some days it is good to be an ecumenist.

And then hurled myself back across the city for a meeting of Interested Church Persons to talk about the state-of-the-church, and the Covenant (p'too), and how the Rambler "got the call," and one thing and another.

Somehow I had had enough coffee by then that the needle was up in the MOTOR-MOUTH red zone.

Home at eleven p.m., and slept, after a fashion, and woke up still caffeinated to the gills...

and away we go...

+++Rowan
David Adams Richards


A radical change in the weather, and I can't even tell you how cold it was this morning because the wind yesterday blew the thermometer off the side of the house -- no lie!

We lost a few substantial branches and a lot of twiggery from the eight or nine full-sized poplars at the Rambler's Rest aka Tether's End...but none of the dendrology came into our house or anyone else's house, TBTG.

I sometimes say I don't actually have a "yard" as such -- I have a vase full of poplars...and I love them, rather more than my neighbours do, alas, even when I encourage them to enjoy all the lovely FREE oxygen pouring over the fences all night long.

Good things happening today at MH & U -- Knit Wits in the Upper Hall, sorting donated yarn and winding it into manageable balls...Husband Units cruising about with younger helpers, unplugging plumbing, and joshing each other non-stop; IT Guy working up a diocesan-wide approach to computer service; and so we mark St. Michael and All the Manifest Flyin' What-nots.

Went downtown to "The Big'Un" under the impression that -- fifth Tuesday and all -- I was on duty for the noon Eucharist. No noon Eucharist -- "not even on a Holy Day?" I allowed myself that much querulousness. So I had a lovely chat with a young friend and then betook myself to downtown lunch (having put eight bucks into the parking machine) which turned out to be delicious and so copious it's going to be supper too.

And tonight is our last session of Thought of Rowan Williams... "THE ISSUE" or as my kids say, "ISSSSSS-sue"...meantime I've received Tokens of Trust and Wrestling with Angels in the mail -- so could start over with another course immediately!

Also finished reading God Is by David Adams Richards. A quirky, deeply felt, ineloquent but compelling, not-at-all-edited polemic against the New Atheism. Man has listened to a lot of cheap'n'cheesy guff in faculty lounges on campuses hither and yon, I can tell you. And he's ALSO a reader of Dostoevsky.

reflections on teaching, and "Can you spell VOCATION?"

We are rejoicing -- or maybe just exhibiting reprehensible smugness -- at MH & U these days over our NINE, count'em, confirmands. Each provided with a mentor, too; and none of the mentors likely to cause harm of any sort to their charges.

This is all good! The young people are mostly boys, just a couple of girls, ranging in age from a very mature 9 to 16.

This means lots of adult males involved in the mentoring, also good.

I also have a handful of wee ones interested in first-communion instruction and/or baptismal instruction.

The issue here is that we welcome whole families with a range of ages and a range of theological backgrounds including the Anabaptist, so there are anomalies in the ages at which our children do things for the first time.

I thought I might economize on effort and energy by teaching the whole mob (the little ones are 6 or 7 years old) through the most basic "Life in the Eucharist" work and then get stuck into William Willimon's material on "Making Disciples" for the balance of the confirmation instruction.

And so on Sunday I found myself in the nave of the church with about 8 of the confirmands, and mentors according, and two bright-eyed church-oriented little girls, and a small crowd of parents, various.

We had spent some time last Sunday on the ante-communion part of the liturgy.

So I moved a small table to the head of the aisle, set it with my travelling communion kit, including wafers, wine, and water, and called the little girls to me, because I thought that doing the teaching "fishbowl" style might be best -- two participants and the rest observers... this seemed to be OK for the group.

I borrowed the two long white brocade bookmarks from the altar-book and put them on the little girls like stoles...and then encouraged them to see what happens at communion time from where the priest sees it...we counted out wafers, poured water, poured wine, washed little hands with the lavabo bowl...we recalled the story of the Last Supper which we tell every Good Friday as part of the children's Way of the Cross.

and I asked them to wonder how many of the roughly-a-dozen of young people there might find themselves doing this work as their life's work. (Actually, I said, "I'll just bet that at least one of you, someday...")

I had NO IDEA how that thought would go over, at all. But it did seem to me that a way to pull them through their confirmation instruction might be by applying the superior magnetic effect of ordination...I still don't know with any confidence whether that's legitimate, or inspired, or unscrupulously manipulative, or what.

But they were MIGHTY thoughtful. The little girls meanwhile were INTO IT...surreptitiously stroking their stoles, and -- one of them -- extending a very small forefinger to touch the wafers in the paten.

So we wrapped up the lesson with some discussion of ways that communion is shared in different churches and in different situations, and they all went home.

But I had feedback...indirectly, from the parents of the little girl who isn't yet baptized. At home with her parents, she told them, "THAT WAS THE MOST MOST SPECIAL THING THAT I HAVE EVER DONE."

And I think that is, after all, what I wanted them to feel about the Eucharist.