Have to admit I have been feeling somewhat low about this particular Low Week. Regular readers - there are about three it seems - will recall that last month I mentioned in passing Fr. William's intention to hove into view this coming Low Wednesday to begin the annual Inspection. Very lowering all round.
Pretty poor timing on his part, it struck me at the time. We clerics never actually have 'time off' - once a cleric always and every day a cleric. Nonetheless, when a fellow has put his heart and soul into making Easter as liturgically passionate as it ought, he is entitled to have a few days of if not exactly rest and recreation then light duties.
Hard indeed it has been to marry the necessary preparations for an Easter - do all the altar youth know precisely who does what, when and to whom? - and squaring the books, plus other vital data needed to demonstrate compliance with current ecclesial standards and targets.
Devils and angels do indeed dwell in the details of both. Nothing more irksome for all if one's left without the requisite prayer sheet mid-Mass simply because young Eric thinks slightly less young Sheila has been striped down for that duty, whilst all the while slightly less young Sheila knows full well that her roles and responsibilities are bounded by ensuring all furniture and fittings - chalices, patens, wines and wafers et al. - are to hand as required, it being a clear young Eric thing to attend the Rector with apposite texts.
There are two Golden Rules of assisting at the liturgy. Rule the First: if you know what to do then do it; if you don't then do something else. Rule the Second: if something comes your way then catch it. Above all make it look as if what is happening is intended and not a Keystone Cops farrago.
Old hands - deacons of great vintage - are much valued in liturgical circumstances. They have a gift - it is a pure charism - of looking utterly dignified and in control even when it should be obvious that all Hell - as it were - has broken out. Youth, by and large, lacks the gravitas to carry off confusion with aplomb. They do tend to giggle, which does not do.
Vintage deacons do not giggle when things go wrong, they merely look the more severe yet serene. It's a great blessing and one which many a hapless priest has praised his Guardian Angel for supplying. Cometh the troubled hour, cometh the deacon and all that jazz.
Patron Saint of this wondrous guild is no doubt Deacon W of blessed memory who, one Mass, was called upon to extinguish a small yet not insignificant fire ignited by Bishop [one simply cannot say] whose exuberant, yet thoughtless, delight with the thurible had spilt sufficient live coals on the altar linen to set it alight.
Batting not an eyelid, nor missing a beat, Deacon W calmly reached for the aspergill, dousing the gathering flames for all the world as if it were an integral part of the ceremony. (Bit Masonic the fire and water thing, but then the laity is generally as ignorant of the Xtian rite as that of the Apron adherents.) Dear Bishop [...] quite never noticed!
H, whom Heaven preserve, is the great instructress of my servers. No drill sergeant ever held such hold over his squaddies as does H over her cadets. With gimlet eye and strident voice H marshals every last one of them into every last smooth detail of their varied and respective duties. They perform on the day as clockwork. Pure precision. Thank you H.
The dear woman - H that is of course - attributes her skills as altar youth trainer-in-chief to a spell spent in 'corporate hostility' in years before she opted for the cleric's wife's role. In such circs. - the ensuring that the show must be flawless - preparation is all. Plan, plan some more, rehearse, then rehearse again was her motto. Anticipate anything that could go wrong - the band going to Rochester rather than the required Rotherham lives large in the annals of corp. host. - and make it clear to all that should anything actually fail on the day then persons responsible would have her to whom to answer. (Scary or what?)
Anyways, there we are with a fine server crew yet all the while here was I with more than half a mind on the paperwork necessary to lay before the Inspectorate. Nothing wrong, of course, with paperwork - what is Saint Peter's Book of Life if not paperwork? - but somehow it has never been my entire strongest suit.Telephone numbers are scrawled on envelopes making entire sense at the time, though but a short week later one simply has no idea whose number it is. Tricky really to phone on spec and ask the answerer who and why they are. Awkward in the extreme when person replies "Well it's me Vicar. Doris whose husband died last Wednesday."
Receipts too suffer likewise. Though there is but a single and unvaried journey of receipt into wallet, thence from wallet into second drawer down in the study desk to wait entry into the accounting system, somehow too many seem somehow to get lost en route. Totally baffling when one simply knows that the receipt for the new lectern ought to be to hand, yet simply isn't when needed to affirm the not inconsiderable expenditure.
This evening though I am not fretting over how to present the best of all fronts to the Episcopal Inspectorate, but relaxing over a large post-Lent malt with not a care to hand.
The cause? One mustn't smile though one does, for it seems that during the Bishop's own Easter Vigil Father Henry somehow managed to trip over a box of hymn sheets in the Vestry that were somewhere they shouldn't be (clearly not a mob trained by H!) and put a knee most fully out.
Whilst one naturally wishes no harm to a fellow cleric, the upshot has been wondrous. Dear Hal had been due to be Diocesan lead on the forthcoming Lourdes pilgrimage, but needing now to travel more as a supplicant than an attendant the Bish has decided that Father Bill must go in his - Hal's - place and not head for the Wolds. Inspection postponed sine die!
Good for Bill's soul no doubt and one great mercy for me. (Result! As they say in footballing circles.)
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