Variety is the spice of life!

As they say! Sunday took me to Erskine Parish Church on a pulpit swap - though for me it involved celebrating communion in a sort of funny, hybrid C of S/SEC way. Blue book EP for Lent, preceded by the Collect of the Day, the penitential intro to Evening Prayer from the 1990 Daily Office, readings, sermon, affirmation of Faith (based on the Decalogue) and the odd experience of having bread a cup on the Holy Table but the punters with those silly wee thimble things and diced mothers pride in their pews! The Evening was enlivened by by discussion (again Ecumenical) on Philosophy of Religion. I was mightily staggered by 18 appearing to talk about the Ontological and Teleological arguments (plus Pascal's Wager) on a cold March evening!!

The 2 funerals went pretty well with decent turnouts at both. And the Blue Brazil are no worse off having played Stenhousemuir twice in a week! Not a bad run! And spellcheck to my amusement thinks Stenhousemuir ought to be spelled Satanism!!

That would be an ecumenical matter.

It was the monthly joint evening service tonight. Dougal on the rota to lead. It's Mary's month of May, so a wee meditation on the BVM for the hordes of ecumenical faithful - all 16 of them. It's not exactly Spiky Mike's: an icon, "Tell out my soul", "As the deer pants", "Jesus remember me", 3 readings with meditations, an Orthodox anthem to the Theokotos said antiphonally and "Mary, blessed teenage mother". The remarkable thing is that it's so unremarkable now. No horror from the Kirk, but a recogniton that it's part of our tradition, so it's something we can share in. No sense of Anglican embarassment and "let's keep this hidden lest we scare the CofS off"; just a natural offering of something we value. This would have been radical 30 years ago, now it's not. Thanks be to God.