Two satisfactory miles this morning, then coffee and fruit, showered and dressed, another cup and toast, then off to church early to prepare for Palm Sunday.
Part of this morning’s activity — and alot of yesterday’s activity — involved putting together scripts for the reading of St Luke’s Passion today. Until this year, St Helen’s used to have the Liturgy of the Palms, and the Procession, but no Passion on Palm Sunday. There’s a logic to that — the reading of the Passion belongs especially to Good Friday, doesn’t it? And the Entry into Jerusalem cries out for a liturgical observance of its own (Palm Sunday, right), right? But Common Worship decrees the Liturgy of the Passion for the main part of the Palm Sunday service, so Passion it was — we’re hewing close to CW during the interregnum rather than foreclose anything the new Team Rector might have in mind.
So, since we were reading the Passion, I planned a dramatised reading of Luke’s Gospel, with Pilate and Peter and servants and soldiers and priests and crowds. I had half expected the music director to print the text for the choir, but yesterday morning he reminded me gently that he’d asked me to. So late afternoon I strolled to the parish office, began printing, and quickly discovered that the parish printer had run out of tuner.
All right, says I, I’ll go on and print them at home. So I strolled back and began printing to the Brother laser printer at home… but part way through that, our printer ran out of toner. I looked in desperation over to our inkjet, which doesn’t duplex printing, so I had to flip pages over and print on both sides. This wasted a certain amount of [ink and] paper, because there are pitfalls to trying to duplex print an eleven-page document by hand. In the case, I got enough printed, and some stalwarts had printed their own copies at home, and I collated and stapled this morning between shower and church.
I gave the choir the ‘crowds’ part, because having the whole congregation cry out ‘Crucify!’ always feels unsuccessful to me. Most Christian congregations can’t get it to sound as though they’re actually baying for Jesus to be crucified. When I first proposed this, my colleague Jen said, ‘Well, then, I nominate you to read the part of Jesus’ which was clever of her because if she’d given me a moment, I’d have said she should read Jesus’s part. She narrated (as Luke), the wardens were Pilate and Peter respectively, and various members of the congregation and choir read the other parts. I stumbled a couple of times on Jesus’s words (in Luke — just different enough from Matthew and Mark to trip me up now and then), but everybody else knocked it for six. Profound thanks to all our readers this morning for a job exceedingly well done.
And now I’m exhausted, except there’s the Boat Race to watch. [Later:] Well, that was dispiriting. Well played, Cambridge, but remember that whatever can’t go on forever, eventually comes to an end. Here’s hoping the end is 2026.