Wet New Year

I celebrated the last Mass of 2011 at St German's this morning, and apart from that spent a quiet day at home doing nothing much. To see the New Year in, we lit the candles on our little tree for the second time this Christmastide with the curtains open to the street, although there seemed to be few people around, given the lousy weather. It was too wet to walk out into Llandaff Fields for the fireworks display. Mary, our neighbour from across the street came over and joined us for a drink to see in the New Year with us. Then it was time for bed, as I needed to be fresh for my one Sunday service of New Year's Day.

We drove to Cowbridge, to the ancient church of Holy Cross in the town centre, where I'd been invited to celebrate the Eucharist and preach for the one service in the Benefice that day, drawing together over sixty people from its eight churches - each of them once a Parish Church in its own right, and each with their own Vicar until half a century ago. The last time I was in Holy Cross church was for Fr Graham Francis' first Mass celebration forty years ago. Much has changed in the years since then.

My prevailing recollection of Holy Cross is of a very grey church, well kept, and sober in appearance, and of a nave crammed with box pews. Graham wanted to celebrate using a nave altar, and there was little room in which to set up a temporary Lord's Table, but somehow we managed. It was probably the first time since the reformation that a nave altar or incense had been used in the church, let alone eucharistic vestments word, Cowbridge Parish being rather low church with a hint of freemasonry about it. This was about as far as 'fresh expressions of church' went in 1971, as far as we were concerned.

Walking into the church this morning was a pleasant surprise. The box pews have been cleared from the front half of the nave, but are retained in the back half and the south aisle. The open area is red carpeted and contains removable chairs. During Advent and Christmastide the whole church is decorated with dozens of Christmas trees, each created by a local voluntary organisation to celebrate its identity and contribution to local public life. This added decoration is a superb festive enhancement, once you get over the idea there's something odd about having more than one Christmas tree on display. It conveyed an impression of warmth and hospitality matched by the welcome we received from worshippers. I much enjoyed leading worship there.

After the service we met with the Curate, Fr David Boult, who is at the moment while Fr Derek Belcher is on sick leave, the only full time cleric serving the communities Benefice. With duties at St German's coming to an end this month, a lot more of my attention will be given to supporting them, especially in Lent and Holy Week. This'll be quite a different challenge for me, as I've done relatively little work in a rural context over the years, where pastoral activity is naturally more dispersed and in small groups.

We lunched at the Loch Fyne restaurant in between Cowbridge and St Hilary on the way home, then I collected an overnight bag and my computer bag of tricks and drove in the rain to Kenilworth to work on migrating Anto's office system to new equipment, a task that proved less than routine, as his main computer had been dying of exhaustion for some time. The simple task of backing up volumes of data to an external drive became increasingly harder. A hint of effort caused it to overheat and cut out. Would it be possible to accomplish the task or were we already in disaster zone? It was half past one when I crawled into bed, still wondering.