As this College term unfolds I'll be spending more time there, minding a few gaps resulting from the departure of Vice Principal Stephen Roberts for pastures new. The hunt for his replacement is on but with the timetable for this, someone new wouldn't be able to start work until early in the New Year. I spent the afternoon in College before presiding at the five o'clock family service, which was a real delight, with three dozen present, including eight children.
Just after we started, I heard a brief wail from a tiny baby at the back of chapel, it was Ivy, the latest addition to the community, daughter of Josh and Rachel. It was an opportunity not to be missed. I slipped out during a hymn and went through the liturgical bookshelf until I found the new texts of the pastoral office for Thanksgiving after Childbirth - the Canadian Prayer Book in fact - with a couple of suitable prayers for the occasion. I called them out after the intercessions, and we prayed with them and blessed Ivy, nestling in her proud Dad's arms.
This really moved me. I haven't had the occasion to perform this office for the best part of a decade. Only recently when I was in Spain on the Feast of the Nativity of the Virgin, I watched a Romanian Orthodox priest blessing a young mother and infant after the church's Saturday morning liturgy, and I found that inspirational and also moving. Wherever there is new life, there is fresh hope.
I was so relieved to learn that replacement locum clergy have been found to look after the Costa Azahar chaplaincy, to cover November to January, by which time (third time lucky?) another chaplain's appointment process will yield results. That means they will only have been without a resident pastor for a fortnight. Even so, getting recruitment moving at all proved a nightmare for church leaders on the ground. For their sakes I'm glad they now have a respite.
After supper I went down to St Mary's Vicarage to do some computer troubleshooting for Father Graham, occasioned by his main machine breaking down and needing both repair and a Windows XP re-installation, along with his main working programs. Somehow the newer version of Lotus Smart Suite he had installed no longer faithfully reproduced complex documents from his archive, making a lot of extra work for him. We spent ages looking for a work around without success, and I ended up bringing his laptop home to complete working on, as a newer version had been installed over an old one which didn't automatically uninstall, rendering both useless. This kind programming weakness may well have contributed to Smart Suite's demise. There's nobody for whom backwards compatibility of programs isn't vitally important.
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