Pentecost hole

We awoke early enough to get to the eight o'clock Eucharist in warm bright sunlight at the Cathedral for the first time in years. I found the quiet simplicity of the service in such a majestic setting was just what I needed, without needing to socialise beyond a smile and a nod, slipping in and out discreetly through the north east door. I wonder if we really make enough effort to provide mainstream acts of worship like this that allow people to be receptive and contemplative without all the demands of singing and ritual to attend to. Maybe that's a reaction on my part to decades of performing sung services 1-3 times every Sunday. Except for this. 

Owain, now an adult at work in e-marketing, has on times observed that the USP (=Unique Selling Point) of church worship is not its music or ritual, no matter how much adherents may value them, but rather the space, the silence, the occasion to pay attention, to contemplate what is being said, and what the symbols used represent. Why don't you simplify more, to address to those who aren't so literate in their grasp of what's going on? He's asked me. Well we have, if you come to eight o'clock, I thought to myself, but it's hardly the most congenial time in a 24/7 world to attract the masses. The Cathedral has 8.00am and 12.15pm said services, representing about a fifth of their Sunday communicants, and the majority are of the older generation, rather than the young and inquisitive. So this doesn't bear out what Owain says, unless he's right about timing, and about how we present what we offer to a potential new audience. The question is, how is the art of contemplation in worship to be commended, and learned by people schooled by today's climate of thought?

As I was parking the car on return, a neighbour came out and drew our attention to a circular hole, hald a metre wide, which had appeared overnight in the middle of a large tarmac patch further up the street. It looked to me as if some subterranean structure, probably a sewer, had collapsed. I rang the '101' number advertised by the City for any and every emergency and reported this at 8.50am. By 10.15am a Council lorry and a couple of highway workers were on the spot, filling the hole temporarily and cordoning it off with cones. That was impressive, to my mind. Congratulations are due to all who make such things happen.