Baptismal encounter

When I came to prepare for today's Christening, I couldn't find the vials containing the Oil of the Catechumens and the Oil of Chrism. I had this vague recollection of having seen them bundled into the Blessed Sacrament aumbry in the Lady Chapel and thinking that wasn't appropriate at the time. I made some enquiries, but drew a blank. The aumbry key was not to be found. What I had forgotten when I started hunting was that I had removed them to a separate place on my last visit. 

Eventually I found them in a box labelled 'Our Lady' sitting quietly on a sacristy shelf. How memory can play tricks on us! The aumbry key, identifiable by a tassel attached to it, was as Caroline the sacristan insisted, in the main vestry safe, but instead of being visible, inits usual position, it was hiding in one of the chalices at the back of the safe.

The next obstacle was finding a baptism certificate. There were none in the study or in the sacristy, and it's possible the stock had run out and not yet been replaced, but nobody could remember. Then, by accident in with the baptism register in the safe, I found an old booklet of baptism certificate forms, dating back, I'd guess to early in the twentieth century, although the stub relating to the first entry was dated 1954. 

Amazingly, there were two loose certificate forms in the empty booklet and I was able to use one of them. The story of their daughter Mia's vintage baptism certificate gave her parents a little amusement, or was it bemusement? The church has only had one baptism register, in its life. The first entry dates from 1866, when ministry to English holidaymakers and residents here began in a hotel private chapel, ten years before the church was constructed.

The certificate, like the register, is simpler than modern equivalents, having no column for date of birth, and no separate column to account for the 'rank, profession or occupation of the mother as well as the father. That's a change for the better from my perspective.

The parents and brothers of Magnus the father arrived an hour early from Italy, and by that time all was ready, so I had time to chat with them about the history of the British in Switzerland, St John's and the nature of the Church of England's reformed catholic character, or you could say equally, its evolved protestanism I guess, as things have changed so much as a result of the liturgical revisions which have taken place during my lifetime. The mother Sarah's family are Belgian Catholics and Magnus's family are Church of Sweden, protestants, yet the baptism service nowadays would be equally familiar to everyone, both in form and content, largely due to ecumenical agreements made on Baptism, Eucharist and Ministry in the last half of the twentieth century. Great, and hopefully lasting achievements on the path to the reconciliation of churches worldwide.

I greatly enjoyed celebrating the baptism with these two relaxed and happy families. They expressed their appreciation, as they took their leave, and Sarah gave me a box of Lindt liqueur chocolates as a personal thank you gift. Then I walked to the lakeside apartment of Geoff and Joy for an apero, and met a couple from Texas who are newcomers to St John's. I ended up staying until nearly ten, well after the couple had left, as we got into some deep conversations about the changing face of the church and its ministry. Fortunately, my sermon for tomorrow was prepared before I came, and already printed. Now it's just a matter of getting to sleep in the heat.

  

Midweek mysteries and digital tasks

At the midweek Eucharist this morning we were four adults and one five year old girl, brought by her mother, and clearly used to being brought to worship. We celebrated Bartholemew the Apostle a day early, with a 1662 BCP service. It's been a while since I last used the old liturgy on a midweek in St Andrew's Los Boliches four years ago, the difference here was an eastward celebration at the Lady Chapel altar. 

Reading the service using a small modern handy booklet without direct lighting was difficult, so I used one of several classic ornate Victorian altar books possessed by the church instead, with much larger, clear print. Even so, I stumbled over page turning at the Offertory, as my eyes weren't quite attuned to the page layout, so I nearly launched into the Consecration rather than the Prayer for the Church Militant. Out of practice, that's for sure. At the end, the child confidently walked into the sacristy and returned with the brass snuffer on a pole to extinguish the altar candles. It was a delightful surprise.

Clare then walked into Montreux gare to meet her friend and former colleague Colette, who came to us from Basel to stay the night. It was marvellous to converse in French, and then later switch to English or a mixture. Colette is fluent in French, German and English after years of working as a teacher internationally. She got me to install WhatsApp on her new smartphone, with German language user interface. Thankfully, Android functions the same way regardless of language settings, so it wasn't a puzzle, except for the odd error message. Curiously, while I was doing this, the house Swisscom wi-fi router lost internet connection. Not even re-booting could restore it. This caused confusion at first, after all, you don't expect fibre broadband to go down like that. 

While internet was inaccessible, but still wirelessly attached to the router, I got a Chromebook browser prompt to access the Swisscom router and troubleshoot the problem. I can remember this happening when we had troubles with the BT network router connection in the CBS office. It was a slower process then, a lot more arcane and fiddly, not user friendly. The shadow of that bad memory warned me not to bother delving into these router settings, potentially in one of several languages. The problem seemed not to be the hardware, but something happening on the external network, so it seemed better to do nothing except wait. An hour later, all was back to normal.

I discovered in the course of the day that no service booklets or sheets were available for me to use next Sunday afternoon for the Christening in Villars. There are few infant baptisms here with an averagely older congregation, and normally when they happen, it's in St John's at a Eucharist, this is now Anglican recommended and desirable best practice, but doesn't cover all pastoral eventualities. So, I had to look for a copy of the required baptism booklet on line, whose contents I could draw from to use for this occasion. 

The Common Worship Baptism rite contains a plethora of options for infant and adult baptisms, and rubrics for all eventualities. I found a PDF to convert to an editable file in Word 2016 on the church computer, then adapted select texts to a recto verso A4 double columned service sheet, of the kind you may still find in the liturgy corner of a specialist church bookshop. The job was made difficult by the fact that the Word conversion preserves all formatting, whether you need it or not. It took me ages to get texts satisfactorily laid out in a readable format. If I hadn't learned how to do this fifteen years ago, the job would have defeated me. 

Just before bed, I emailed the service sheet PDF to  Jane the Church Warden, who'll get copies made at a print-shop. Apparently the church photocopier is on its last legs. Once upon a time, every church had its copier, bought or rented with a service contract. The modern digital print-shop is cheaper, far more versatile in what it offers, and there are far more of them, so there's far less incentive to pay to maintain older equipment. All in all, it was satisfying evening's chore.