Tomorrow, we celebrate Michaelmas on Dunoon Pier.
The splendid pier-building is well on it’s way to being a worship space (though it looks a bit more like an ad for IKEA right now), and my study is awash with props.
12 – 8 pm, at the pier. Just across the street from the highland dance competition, so Dunoon should be awash with prayer.
Well, both congregations were remarkably willing (though Dunoon takes the prize for most competent group origami ever). Photos here, as per request.
It sounded like such a good idea: for a couple of months in the year, on the third Sunday of the month, the Piskie and the C of S congregations would join together for a communion service. When I take it, is according to our practice. When the C of S minister, it is according to his.
My goal is to help our tiny little congregation feel more at ease in joining in with their neighbours, and to remind all those English folk who have retired to Tighnabruaich that we exist and they can come for communion occasionally even if they want to worship with the larger church more often.
For the C of S minister, I suspect the goal is both to offer hospitality and to restore an old practice of occasional evening communion which he is happy to support, but doesn’t really want to preside at all the time.
Easy, right? Proper and good for small rural congregations.
And it will be.
But first we have to sort out wine (for us: wine, fermented grape. for them: grape juice, must be non-alcoholic) then bread (for us: bread or wafers. for them: oatcakes) then the requirements of coeliacs (OK with wafers/rice wafers. OK with oatcakes. But since I suspect they won’t be happy with wafers and we won’t be happy with oatcakes…)
So what do you think? How do we resolve the wine/grape-juice/bread/wafer/oatcake situation?
I wonder what other unforseen challenges with arise.
This blog has rather lost its way of late. Plenty to blog about, but a distinct lack of time and energy to see it through. So, we begin again.
That has been a theme of the week, really. Last night we scrapped most of the vestry agenda to try to cut through the anxiety that has been mounting over property and to reconnect with God. The usual item on the agenda, ‘opening prayers’, took the form of a slow and meditative house communion, with cat and candles and grazing rabbits in sight.
I have always said that I do not reuse services or sermons. Each occasion is different and makes it’s own demands. And yet, last night, I echoed fairly directly a service that a friend and I put together for TISEC. It was the service that broke all the rules (though not the eucharistic ones) and the one I most enjoyed. I never for a moment thought I’d use it again. But for the past fortnight — ever since realising how anxious we had all become — this is the service that I knew I had to use. Not just a house communion, but this rather strange version of a communion that invited people to enter into their own weariness and to find God there.
Good old Elijah:
What are you doing here, Elijah?
I have been very zealous for the Lord, and everything I have tried has failed. I am tired and without hope. Just let me die now.
What are you doing here, Elijah?
Angels come, and Elijah is fed and forced on his way across the desert to Horeb.
What are you doing here, Elijah?
I have been very zealous for the Lord… and I am the only one left, and they are seeking my life.
Go, and stand on the mountain before God, for the Lord is about to pass by.
And Elijah has to face the fact that God is not in the crashing storm or the raging fire, or in all the disastrous things that demand his attention and threaten to overwhelm him. But when Elijah has survived those things and is left standing, he hears silence fall and knows he must cover his face to enter the presence of God. God asks him again:
What are you doing here, Elijah?
The answer remains the same. Elijah still feels overwhelmed; the path God asks Elijah to walk does not become any easier. But something has changed.
Elijah returns to the place he fled and begins to prepare for God’s future.
wonderful exchange 