Woke up to another cloudy day, posted the Morning Prayer YouTube link to WhatsApp at seven thirty, and dozed for another three quarters of an hour before getting up for breakfast with a painful muscle spasm just below my shoulder blades, which refused to subside for the rest of the morning. I celebrated the mid-week Eucharist at St Catherine's, where there were eight of us, and St John's where there were six of us. As there's no Ascension Day Eucharist in Canton Parish tomorrow, I used the readings for tomorrow at St Catherine's and added the Ascension day collect to the Rogationtide readings prepared for St John's.
We've almost lost a traditional liturgical observance within the Eastertide season. The slow erosion of a seasonal rhythm of celebration serving as an awkward counter current to the secular calendar driven by pragmatic and economic necessities of modern life saddens me. We have a bank holiday this week, and it's half term. Time out for many. There are many music and cultural festivals, but fewer fiestas related to our religious history and identity. Some Orthodox churches still choose to celebrate festivals according to the Julian calendar on dates that differ from the mainstream secular Gregorian calendar, out of sync with the modern world. It's their way of affirming that times and seasons for worship are something other than that dictated by society, an invitation to stop and think, to be counter-cultural, a buzz-word in theology that's fallen out of fashion in the church's struggle to stay relevant and popular.
While I was giving a short homily at St John's my phone rang and disrupted everything. On one of those rare occasion when I took my phone to the lectern with me to read Rogationtide prayers from it, I set it on 'Do not disturb' rather than flight mode, as I needed the phone to retain an internet connection, in case it lost the necessary prayer text on display, but incoming calls still over-ride this. Later I discovered a short cut setting which prevents ringing and buzzes the phone instead. It's only the second time my phone has gone off while I've been preaching in the past fifteen years. Fortunately the congregation laughed it off with me, and I didn't get upset about it. It's not unusual for congregation members to get caught out by phone noises during a service, even when they've been reminded to switch off, after all.
Lunch was nearly ready by the time I got home, feeling drained from contending with the muscle spasm in my back. After we'd eaten, I lay on the floor with a book under my head for ten minutes, then dozed in the chair for an hour until it was time to walk. The sun came out but it was still quite windy. This has slowed up completion of the fabric roof and wall covering of the padel court framework. It's now 95% finished, but there's a lot more work still to be done. What they do with the spare tonnes of earth excavated to create the court space itself remains to be seen.
After supper, I watched the rest of 'Evilside' in which a sinister role play game clues pointed to a children's home where drugging teenagers in order to control them was usual, and one of the locally respected perpetrators, a caring foster mother, turned out to be a psycho masquerading behind apocalyptic religious piety. A cleverish plot twist in context, but it left the discovery of the original teenage murder victim's body unexplained. So much for unsatisfactory story telling.
Late this evening I received a notification saying that there would be an Ascension Day Eucharist at seven tomorrow night. This wasn't listed in the week's services appearing in the weekly Sway bulletin, nor on the West Cardiff Ministry Area website. Keeping communication about church life and worship up to date and relevant isn't necessarily demanding, but it does require routine discipline, and relies entirely on a two way flow of information between lay and clerical leaders to succeed. I recall how difficult that was when I tried to do the job during the last spell of ministry vacancies. If churches lose interest in sharing information and extending an open invitation to join in worship by every medium generally used; notice board, digital newsletters, email, social media platforms etc; it's not surprising people outside the inner circle of regulars lose interest in church altogether.
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