Random Notes from Today

It's only 3:30 and I'm already feeling exhausted. Lots going on today--but it felt productive and that's good. One needs to feel productive in their work, sometimes.

Highlights include arranging the space into it's Advent configuration. I got most of it done by myself in 35 minutes. The final touches (moving the altar off the raised Chancel area) only took another 10 or 15 minutes with the help of another guy. It looks great. Predictably, it gets faster each time I do it.

Susy Bleasby stopped by with the first sketches of our proposed mural project for the kid's room upstairs. It looks very good, and we had one of those fun conversations about what the kingdom of heaven might look like. I'm looking forward to the next round of drawings.

I noticed this article in the New York Times about a movement among Jews in the 20's and 30's. It sounds a lot like the Emerging Church movement in Christian Faith. I think these movements are really critical to understanding the future of religion and spirituality in North America.

The kitten, BTW, is doing brilliantly. It's amazing to actually watch him learn how to do the most basic cat things. He's still missing some jumps, for example, and falling off of stuff when he gets to carried away. And it was wonderful comfort to have them around after some of the bad days we've been having lately.

I had a very intense prayer experience this morning. Sometimes it is really nice to surrender to the liturgy and let it do what it do. zone of the nice things about belonging to a tradition that likes to take prayers from books (BCP/BAS/etc) is that we can surrender the burden of being o-so-clever with God. Why make it up fresh everytime when others have done in better in the past? So even when I'm being liturgically "creative" (as with this Sunday upcoming) I'm still basing everything on ancient and well-used rites. This Sunday we are doing aspergance, the Great Litany, and then a pretty standard modern language Eucharist after that. I'm thrilled.

-t