That would be an ecumenical matter...

I have been reflecting much on a service that took place in the Scottish Episcopal church on Bute on Sunday. I have hesitated to say much about it, because I find clerical fascination with how worship goes can be quite unflattering and ungracious, especially when read by others in the same line.

But it was a wonderful evening.

It was a 'slightly' choral evensong - sung versicles and responses, and a taize 'anthem'. With a smattering of hymns, of generally rousing genre. It was 1929, in form, lectionary etc. The officiant shewed up in choir dress. All that sort of stuff.

...and the delight?

We ran out of orders of service, almost by half. Bad planning, of course.

...I found myself wondering if I should have pushed the structural engineer from Ayr harder to get on and survey the balcony before we squeezed so many folk into it.

...and the responses were sung loudly by baptists, catholics, presbyterians, a salvationist (Major Nessie!) and our smattering of piskies, old and new members alike.

It was a gorgeous evening of ecumenical worship, with ALL the church leaders of bute, bar none, all there with big smiles on their faces.

Dare one say it? Yes, one dares: Praise the Lord!

When the wind blows...

Frankie was playing with her monster dolls in the bay windows of the living room yesterday when she spotted, through the stormy gloom, that the trampoline was lifting off the ground by about two feet (how she knows imperial measurements at age ten I'm not sure...)

It was a rather stormy evening, so Mary and I rushed out into the night to discover that the large (16 feet) diameter trampoline had pulled free of its anchors and was starting to make a bid for freedom towards the sea. We wrestled it down, lashed new ropes to the still ground-bound anchors, tied a spare boat mooring rope from the frame to a cherry tree, stripped down the safety net and battened down our metaphorical hatches.

This morning, a little askew and looking slightly odd with a 3/4 inch rope sagging between it and the tree, it still safely there.

A lucky thing that Frankie spotted the beginning of the trouble brewing, otherwise it would probably now be about level with Stornoway, heading towards Iceland.

The church is still there too...

Most inconvenient...

Molly the rectory collie has decided to reach puberty this week - so we have something like three weeks of walking her on a lead, fighting off overly-interested dogs and generally not being able to do 'the usual' when it comes to dog ownership. She spent a bring-and-share lunch today cooped up in the rabbit run in the garden. It is a very big rabbit run!

But development, whether human or canine, is not designed for our convenience.

It's designed to make us grow, gain experience, achieve new levels and types of maturity.

So I suppose that's a good thing.

But it is all a bit inconvenient.

The Lord Almighty grant us a quiet night and a perfect end...

The wisdom of offering a sung compline as the short ecumenical act of worship on Bute has been knitting my brows somewhat. But I offered it, at the ministers' meeting (once known as the fraternal) and some were keen. So we did it. With a short introduction to what compline actually is. And to how the four lined clefs with square blobs work as musical notation. And we did it. So I remain with brow slightly furrowed, wondering in which direction the boundaries of ecumenical understanding have been pushed. But it certainly flushed out the Anglicans who now go to the Church of Scotland but remember (fondly it seems) choral evensong. Not the same animal, but from a nearby stable. So we wait, brow a little tense, to see what feedback drifts over from the island...