The strangest thing about Cathedral ministry is, pace my friends in parishes, how completely un-frantic even the highest and most holy seasons are...
I know m'colleague, the Canon Precentor, has been extraordinarily busy creating orders of service...but even he is spared the hours of nocturnal copying and anxious prayer over a reluctant machine which were for so many years an inextricable part of all major celebrations in the parish.
With so few children and no schools to call our own, there's no cutting out and prepping for family crafts at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, and Experience Easter was left in the capable hands of the schools team.
Music? That's down to the choirs, of course. Rota for the Maundy Watch? Not part of life here...any more than the Holy Saturday spring clean. And so it goes on. The many wonderful teams that make up cathedral life simply do their jobs..the tasks of preaching and leading worship are shared without fuss...and such paddling under the surface as does go on is shared out too.
So one thing to say as Holy Week begins is a huge THANK YOU to everyone whose work makes it happen. When I came home from the Cathedral after worship this morning, the vergers were just settling down to prepare the oils for blessing at Thursday's Chrism Mass. I sometimes wonder if the verging team could usefully have the subtitle "The team that never sleeps...".
But I'm also wondering whether there is something about the intense busyness of a parish observance that actually helps with the spiritual journey too. Right now this feels as if it could be a week like any other, give or take that point each evening when we come together for Compline as the shadows lengthen, in the Cathedral as in Jerusalem.
I hope that, despite the fact that all that is required of me is that I step at the right moment into the places alotted to me, I find ways to immerse myself, heart, mind and soul, in the week that changed the world. It's the most important journey of all.
I know m'colleague, the Canon Precentor, has been extraordinarily busy creating orders of service...but even he is spared the hours of nocturnal copying and anxious prayer over a reluctant machine which were for so many years an inextricable part of all major celebrations in the parish.
With so few children and no schools to call our own, there's no cutting out and prepping for family crafts at the foot of the cross on Good Friday, and Experience Easter was left in the capable hands of the schools team.
Music? That's down to the choirs, of course. Rota for the Maundy Watch? Not part of life here...any more than the Holy Saturday spring clean. And so it goes on. The many wonderful teams that make up cathedral life simply do their jobs..the tasks of preaching and leading worship are shared without fuss...and such paddling under the surface as does go on is shared out too.
So one thing to say as Holy Week begins is a huge THANK YOU to everyone whose work makes it happen. When I came home from the Cathedral after worship this morning, the vergers were just settling down to prepare the oils for blessing at Thursday's Chrism Mass. I sometimes wonder if the verging team could usefully have the subtitle "The team that never sleeps...".
But I'm also wondering whether there is something about the intense busyness of a parish observance that actually helps with the spiritual journey too. Right now this feels as if it could be a week like any other, give or take that point each evening when we come together for Compline as the shadows lengthen, in the Cathedral as in Jerusalem.
I hope that, despite the fact that all that is required of me is that I step at the right moment into the places alotted to me, I find ways to immerse myself, heart, mind and soul, in the week that changed the world. It's the most important journey of all.
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