As it was a bright clear day today, my sister June's birthday, so I called her to sing her Happy Birthday and we chatted for half an hour. I wish I could go up and see her for the day, but the logistics are still a bit tricky. An overnight stop would make a visit easier, whatever my mode of transport, as a very early start travelling is fraught with practical difficulties until I get the next op out of the way..
Clare and I walked along the Taff Trail to Llandaff North and had lunch in a cafe there, offering a nice selection of dishes. Thanks to a mild winter, families of long tailed tits could be seen and heard foraging on the bare branches of trees in places I haven't seen before. The number of them I've seen in the avenue of trees approaching Blackweir Bridge is greater than last year. We also saw and heard a couple of coal tits at close range as well. It helps that our parks and open spaces are managed in a way that encourages birds and wildlife these days. The environment doesn't look as neat and tidy with fallen trees made safe and large portions of trunks or big branches left to rot, but this naturally increases insect population and is good for other creatures that feed on them. There are more and more daffodil shoots growing tall enough to produce heads and it won't be long before they burst into flower, some species a month earlier than usual.
When we got back, I had a sermon to finish, and some more novel writing to do before watching this week's double episode of 'Wisting'. Unlike other Scandi-noir series it seems to be ten episodes. I think that's two too many. The pace of the story has slowed down but to no good efffect. It's not exactly agonising suspense.
This morning I celebrated and preached at St Catherine's, the first time for several months. Twenty seven Sunday School children came up for a blessing with their parents at the Communion. Since Epiphanytide started there have been seasonal liturgical changes, in line with the alternatives that the Church in Wales Liturgical Commission provide. Nothing unusual, except that I hadn't been warned of this until I got to church. Not even Clare remarked on the change, now in its third week.
Since last weekend's diocesan centennial inaugural service in the Cathedral, each church has its own 'Pilgrimage Candle' to burn, as the centenary theme is 'Pilgrimage'. There was a little blessing and lighting ceremony to insert into the service at the start. Fr Rhys came over from St John's to brief me about this beforehand thankfully. The presiding minister's lectern hadn't been re-organised from last week, and didn't contain all the texts I needed for this week's service. This wasn't immediately obvious when I got started, so I had to shuffle papers as I went along.
It's not unusual to have to do this as a visiting locum priest, if a church is a bit disorganised about these things. It's fine if there's a conscientious lay person whose habitual duty is to pay attention to detail and arrange things for a priest. Far too often, however, the incumbent does it for themselves, and if they aren't present nobody else bothers to attend to things which make things easy for a visiting cleric. It used to be so much easier when there was no more than two books to use - one for the Liturgy of the Word and another for everything else.
The Preface to the three English books of Common Prayer explains the rationale behind liturgical reform, not just in terms of the need for vernacular worship and simplicity of structure, but also in the usage of just Bible and Prayer Book instead of the plethora of complex liturgical text books in use at the time, which needed a separate user instruction book to ensure all is done correctly. It seem to me that we Anglicans have stepped back in that direction. The variety and beauty of many of the available prayers and liturgies is to be appreciated. I'm not so sure about a complexity which makes the whole liturgical offering of the church less accessible to every man than it has been for the past five hundred years.
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