Monday 2 April 2012

Holy Week Monday

After a quiet morning at home preparing a sermon. I'm not taking any services this week until Good Friday so I can take my time. After lunch visited the office to prepare a data CD for the annual audit of Cardiff Business Safe finances. The opportunity to tidy up the records I've kept inevitably reveals small things left incomplete from busy periods. Everything must be examined to ensure that whoever prepares our financial statements has a record that cross checks bank statements, invoices and receipts with a fair degree of accuracy. 

A short afternoon turned into a long one. In the end I opted not to drive to Cowbridge for worship, but to go nearer home and not have to rush to church. I walked over to St Luke's Canton which had a later starting time, and attended a Solemn Mass with forty attending. The liturgy was beautifully crafted with plenty of silence and not a wasted word. Father Mark used the poem of the day with his own commentary woven in to that from Janet Morley's fine Lent Book 'The heart's time'. It was altogether most refreshing.

The fact of today's date falling in Holy Week had me reminiscing again about the Saint Paul's riots which erupted this day in 1980. The second was a Wednesday, and we had a Confirmation Mass at St Agnes, presided over by Bishop Freddy Temple. It was all happening in the couple of hours before and during the service. Girls in white dresses went up the road afterwards to gaze with innocent amazement at Lloyd's Bank on fire, and police with riot shields in the distance. Amanda our foster daughter was one of them. I wonder if she still remembers that bizarre evening?
 

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