We went to the Parish Eucharist at St Catherine's this morning. Emma preached in cheerleader mode (a role I know well from locum duties), encouraging people to continue working together in the way they've found they can under Fr Mark's leadership. I guess we rely on inspiration being given a voice rather than coming from a set of raw ideas, so it's natural for people to feel uncertain about how they will continue without a beloved pastor and guide. What harder to notice, however, is the momentum generated by effective ideas and ways of working together in a community. Cheerleading in this sense, is about acknowledging and affirming who we are, what we've become on the journey being made together.
After the service, I went straight home to cook lunch, while Clare went down to the Riverside Market on Taff Embankment, as it's the 20th anniversary of its foundation. It's rare that we go there together nowadays, as we get a bag of organic veggies delivered by the Farmers Market to Chapter Arts Centre for us to collect every Wednesday and any special cheeses we can get from a new stall that's now going strong in Cardiff Market.
I had an unexpected email from Fr Mark after lunch, asking if I could step in urgently and officiate at St John's monthly Evensong, as something unexpected had come up. How nice! I don't remember when I last officiated at an Evensong - oh yes I do. It was the end of August last year at the chapel of St Michael in Caux, 600m above Lac Leman. The service is an annual event in a beautiful turn of the 20th century Anglican building subsequently taken on by the local Vaudois protestant parish. Sadly it was impossible to organise this again during my recent locum stay. I was quite sad about that, as it's a wonderful venue for Evensong, with the setting sun streaming in over the Savoyard Alpes across the lake, bathing the interior in golden light. You just have to sing the Phos Hilaron.
Anyway, apart from the organist, I had a congregation of two, with a long OT passage from Joshua delineating the boundaries of the tribal territories to be occupied after crossing the Jordan. It's full of hard to pronounce place names, so the man who usually enjoys reading asked if he could read the NT lesson instead. As I read, that long inventory of locations, I found myself imagining flying over the terrain in a helicopter, and shared this thought with the faithful few subsequently. It occurred to me that today's mapping technology privileges us to get an overview of any place on earth in ways not available to our forebears, and thereby able to bring alive for us a passage of scripture which in times past would have been excruciatingly dull and unprofitable to listen to.
Afterwards the other attendee asked if I'd seen a recent programme about the Lebanon in which the presenter had gone up in a hot air balloon to view an historic landscape, as part of explaining the geography behind the politics and sociology. Yes, privileged we are indeed today! But will all these new perspectives and information about the world we live in help us better to answer the problems we face, I wonder?
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