Two miles, legs a bit stiff but not ‘dead legged’, 10° in a steady, very light rain, at a surprisingly decent pace (considering my morning run by itself represented roughly half of what I walked in St Andrews, despite having done a fair amount of meandering). A little less sleep than would have been optimal — got to bed just before midnight, awake at 5:30 as usual — but I expect I’ll adapt back to my usual pattern of life satisfactorily.
What a delightful Holy Week in St Andrews! Fr Alasdair and I were not that familiar with one another in person, but (so far as I could tell) we got on famously this week, despite some of the theological (and perhaps theoretical) differences that often set people at odds. Likewise the congregation at All Saints — an intensely impressive small-to-medium size congregation that turned out in such numbers that yesterday’s procession during the Litany of the Saints nearly gridlocked itself as the altar party tried to squeeze into the path of the last contingent of the congregation. We had significantly more communions than we’d planned for — a happy problem indeed. Plus, I ran into T.J. Lang on the street, reconnected with Madhavi and the abundantly cheerful, ruddy-cheeked Gabriel, and spent days and long evenings conversing with Lil, Edward, Karlee, and Stephen. Nobody seemed to object to my preaching or deaconing (haven’t deaconed an ad orientem, Solemn High Mass since… I’m not even sure when, and haven’t done so regularly since I was serving at Christ Church (and even then, it was an Anglican Missal Mass rather than a Scottish Prayerbook (1929) (I think) Mass, hadn’t chanted the Gospel in a year or so….