Finally this morning, we woke up to a light sprinkling of snow, not much more than a centimetre. After breakfast an extended time of Sunday Prayer. I read through the Eucharist of the day, rather than watch on-line, as Clare did. That is, until the live feed transmission broke down, thanks to the introduction of a different piece of kit to the St John's chapel cum studio where the service takes place.
I can't quite put my finger on it yet but didn't have the heart to join her today. I feel fine at watching a broadcast Eucharist in any form with a live congregation. It's easy to join in. I've attended a couple of Euro diocesan services on Zoom, with eighty others in their little on-screen boxes, No sound of the group responding, or singing together. Not knowing anyone apart from the Bishops leading didn't help. I found it a bit strange, even though it was well thought out.
I think Zoom could be tolerable at a Benefice or congregational level, because I would recognise faces in the little on-screen boxes. Our Benefice streams one service on-line via Facebook. The camera operator says the responses, and recorded hymns are played with the text displayed. I've watched Parish services with Clare before the Eucharist in church resumed, but today, I reverted to what I did in Ibiza, and read through Matins and the Eucharist. I miss receiving Communion but equally miss being in a group and responding to the priest together. 'We who are many are one bread, one body' is what we all say and that is what makes liturgy alive and life giving to me.
Watching passively even with Clare still feels disembodied - that's the word. Prayer for me is never just in the mind and on the tongue, but a physical and social action in which we carry each other. The truth of this came home to me after five months of social isolation, then returning to public worship, and then being separated from it again. In a crisis we have to do our best and make the best we can of our situation, and our clergy have certainly made an immense effort to make the on-line offering an enriching alternative. It's the passivity that leaves me feeling out on a limb, I guess.
For centuries before my time, clergy recited the liturgy at the altar and an assistant answered and maybe a choir sang, depending on the occasion. The laity were entirely observers, and the highlight for them was to watch the elevation of the Host and Chalice during the Words of Institution. But they were there together, and that mattered. Looking down the narrow channel of the video screen is not the same. In fact, I feel more involved if I just listen to a service on the radio, or recite a service aloud myself. Somehow it offers room for the imagination to work, not least in feeling connected to others who listen actively. Or am still missing something, or finding my own spiritual poverty exposed from a new angle? Time will tell I guess.
I went for a long walk in the park before lunch and a shorter one after. All morning despite clouds, the sun shone through. It was cold enough for the snow not to melt immediately. Children with their parents were having a lot of fun together while it lasted. It became overcast in the afternoon, but the snow by then had nearly all melted and the temperature stayed around zero and felt even colder. Very refreshing!
In the evening I watched the second episode of Finding Alice, in which the newly widowed quirky heroine organises a funeral at home and buries her husband in the garden without planning permission. I foresee trouble ahead. A DIY secular funeral ceremony echoed church liturgy, without text or context, featuring without explanation a cleric as mistress of ceremonies, claiming to be OK about doing humanist funerals as religious ones. No so far fetched in real clerical life. Was she a hospital chaplain running a bereavement group in the hospital mortuary suite featured earlier in the episode? I wasn't sure. All a bit odd, though not totally odd. It's been quite real in its representation of grief and grieving so far, but where next, I wonder?
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