Our recent run of sunny early mornings came to an end today with all over cloud cover, and a chilly wind from the east, but fortunately the cloud started moving west and the day got lighter and brighter as it went on. By early afternoon the sky was all blue again. I woke up remembering I had a music playlist to send to Pidgeons for tomorrow's funeral and while I was at my desk, straight after breakfast, prepared orders of service for the next two funerals, and printed off the one for tomorrow. Then notice of another funeral arrived in two week's time.
Then Morning Prayer and housework. Clare went for a GP appointment about the agonising wrist pains she's coping with at the moment, and been ordered an X-ray to see what's going on inside the joints. This is rheumatoid arthritis, but it could be exacerbated by a side effect from the calcium injections for the osteoporosis in her spine. The many frustrations of getting old!
I cooked pasta with butter beans in a sauce with mushrooms and Swiss chard for lunch according to one of my own recipes. Then I started work on a second Morning Prayer video for Friday this week, standing in for Fr Rhys, who's away on a course. According to the CofE Calendar it is both the feast of St Columba and that of St Ephrem the Syrian, but the Church in Wales Calendar has moved St Ephrem to the 10th for no discernable reason. Ephrem died of plague in Edessa on 9th June 373. Columba died at Iona on the same date in 597. Both are of equal significance, Columba, as the evangelizer of Scotland and Northern Ireland, and Ephrem as a great poet, writer and teacher of Christian faith grounded in the Nicene Creed. He was the John and Charles Wesley of his day combined, with over 400 hymns to his credit. I have an extra affection for him since my explorations and travels discovering Middle Eastern Christianity in Syria and Palestine thirty years ago.
I set out to write a reflection on Ephrem for Friday's Morning Prayer, and found out much more in a brief internet search than I did back in the late 1990s, when all that was available was to be found in several well researched books for a select academic audience. Since then, the rise of the internet and Wikipedia, allowing expert collaborators (and sometimes eccentric idiots as well) to build an on-line account of a person's life and all their work as comprehensive as one could have wished for back then, or now.
Then I did some further checking and realised that Friday's liturgy is in honour of Columba exclusively, so I had to abandon my new findings for another occasion, and write something relevant to Columba instead. It wasn't difficult, as it gave me an opportunity to speak about the surprising and unexpected path which is followed when the Gospel spreads spontaneously. Today we're all so full of plans and strategies that we fail to realise that the seeds of the Word once sown, grow naturally organically. It's all there in scripture and is simply ignored, to the discredit of modern church leaders, out of touch with the grass roots and the lessons learned from two millennia of church tradition.
I wrote while Clare was having her siesta. When she woke up she reminded me were going to make bread today, so I stopped writing and got to work on making a batch of dough and putting it in tins ready for the over. Then, I went out for a brisk walk to Aldi's and back to buy some of their wine for a change. When I returned, Clare had baked the bread and turned them out of the tins, looking good. Very satisfying. Straight away I left for Cowbridge Road and caught a number 18 bus to take me up to 'The Res' for a concert, part of the national 'Churches Unlocked 2023' public relations exercise.
Jan the Vicar, is a professional standard strings musician, and with two collaborators, playing organ, piano and singing, put on an hour long programme of accessible music in church, just for pleasure. There were meant to have been four of them, an oboist as well, but she got sick at the last moment, and Jan had to play all the oboe pieces unrehearsed to hold the programme together, and did so superbly. There were about forty there in the audience, among them, four from St Catherine's who'd come by car driven by Stephen, who gave me a lift back to Pontcanna, and invited me and the others back to his house for a drink afterwards. A delightful summer evening surprise.
I was back by nine, but had to spend nearly an hour investigating the failure of our TalkTalk 'You View' digibox device, leaving us without telly. It hadn't died, but it took that long to realise that the wall plug with its built in transformer wasn't fully inserted, even though it appeared to be. If only I'd thought to look properly at the power source first of all, I wouldn't have wasted so much time!
At the end of quite a busy day, glad to turn in for the night at last.
