Well Christmas has crept along the lane to Blogstead. Unfortunately we had to miss the first in a series of social events last night but there will be others.
My statement on Facebook that I was having my usual problem with a Christmas morning sermon brought a avalanche of helpful suggestions from clergy who were obviously wasting time on Facebook rather than writing Christmas morning sermons. To a man, as it were, they recommended Ian Poulton on ‘For the Fainthearted’. And if you’re stuck, you could do much, much worse. Good Betjeman lines which I might pinch.
I’ve obviously been in trouble before because, when I opened what my former Rector, Hammie Leckey, used to call my ‘store of treasures old and new’ – meaning a file enticingly labelled ‘Christmas Morning St Andrews St Andrews 2007’ I found two pages of Christmas jokes and nothing else. I must have said something else suitably weighty and episcopal but I haven’t the faintest idea what it was. The record suggests that all I managed was ‘What did Adam say to Eve on the day before Christmas?’ – Answer: ‘It’s Christmas, Eve’
Well tomorrow can look after itself. For now, Bam Bam and Mark are home. Poppy is luxuriating on the settee. All is calm. All is bright. Happy Christmas to you and yours.
Yes! The silent spaces are very very very important.
Couldn’t agree more. The whole point about the words – and even more the music – is that they are there to frame the silences. But if people – and choirs – keep wanting to cram more stuff in, you never get to the spaces.
Was at St Mary’s Cathedral last night for Midnight Eucharist, and what I vividly remember was not the sermon, the wonderful music, or the liturgy, but that silent space as the Choir finished singing at the end of Communion, and the Cathedral was lit only by the candles on the window-ledges,ones on the screen and those held by all the congregation….so perhaps the words are not always the most important part.
Poems are always useful when one is lost for words!