Wandering Anglican visits Grace Church, Louisville KY

My recent travel had me in Louisville, Kentucky for a week. As usual I had a VERY busy schedule, but analysis of my meeting schedules and local bus schedules told me it would be possible to get away at least to attend Vespers Monday night at Grace Church in Louisville. In full knowledge of what could go wrong on a venture of this kind, I went ahead to visit them.

Well, maybe not "full knowledge". Lost my cellphone on the outward bus (it was not recovered), and I had the street address wrong in memory so I initially walked past the church entrance, in heat & humidity far higher than we usually encounter in Seattle. I was almost happy to find the doors locked so I could head back, cool off, and try to locate my phone. Yet, for all it was advertised as "the hermitage," there was a car or two in the drive.

But as I started to leave the bells rang and despite myself I turned back.

And happened to meet one of the Deacons (please forgive me, I am terribly forgetful of names!) at the door. He explained that the Rector, Fr. M. Seraphim Thomas (who my wife met at Synod this year), was away and the central air-conditioning had failed, so they were holding Vespers in a room upstairs instead of the church. I wound up part of a very small group conducting Vespers (1928 BCP Evening Prayer).

A wonderful opportunity to shed some of the material stress the loss of the cellphone incurred (expensive to me, but it's no iPhone or Google phone). Yes, it was unlikely to be turned in to lost&found; yes, its loss would impact my daily conduct of business, but as one of the readings for the day said, take no heed of such things. I came out with my anxiety level tuned down significantly.

And to the good people of Grace Church, thank you too for the cold bottle of water! I was dehydrating quickly in this (to me) hot climate.

I hope to return someday when things might be more normal all the way around.

False alarm

I was just sitting down to start on the next posting -- when the phone range. It was the alarm company advising that the alarm had gone off on the north building, and how long would it take me to meet the policeman there?

Fortunately it was a false alarm. Somebody had showed up to clean and had forgotten about the alarm. Whew.

But that crimped my afternoon schedule. The next post will have to wait a few hours.

Selah

On the road again, this time for a week of meetings in Louisville, Kentucky.

Dude, what happened to all the "Visitor Locations"?

I am warned in advance that the "Visitor Locations" map on the right hand of the page is about to be reset to zero. The last time it happened I chalked it up to "server error -- everything reset to zero." But it seems it is not the case; they periodically start over so some blogs' charts don't become a bleeding mass of red.

It's annoying; a more accurate practice would be to keep a running tally of the last (100? 356? days) access, but then again that would require probably considerably more computation and unnecessary energy consumption for what is, really, a frill.

Oh well. There is an archive.

Announcements Sunday

On the Ordo Kalender Sunday was the First Sunday after Trinity, but at St. Bartholomew's it was Announcements Sunday. Deacon Ed had nothing in particular to announce, but Nancy J and Barbara quickly leaped in with an announcement about the Garden Guild, which will be hosting the Coffee Hour next Sunday -- and asked folks to bring colorful plants that are resistant to rabbits, deer, and mountain beaver. I haven't seen the mountain beaver, but have seen deer and Sunday saw that the rabbits are still around -- with the presence of this little one down by the entrance, not much larger than a man's fist.

This was followed by another Garden Guild announcement about the weekly watering schedule, and other gardening folks may wish to do.

Then another announcement... but that one's a secret for now.

Then the Senior Warden gave an advance announcement about the visit the weekend of the 4th by our third rectoral candidate, details to follow later.

Okay, we're done, we thought but no... Another announcement about Saturday's Mens' Fellowship Breakfast and following work party.

Then an announcement about the next dinner St. Bartholomew's will be hosting for Tent City 4 in July.

And then... a reminder that the food banks continue to need donations.

And then finally, the service could continue. Whew!

(These items are in more detail on the church website's Announcements page.)

The Athanasian Creed

What could have been more appropriate for Trinity Sunday than the Athanasian Creed? That's what our second candidate gave us -- a copy (not in this format and capitalized differently) passed out with the bulletin, and recited before the sermon. We're quite familiar with the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, but I think this is the first time I've read the Athanasian Creed.

No foolin'

This time our visiting candidate won't be fooled by the weather. For all the forecast said "sun," it might be that Woodinville is getting a little precipitation, just as we had here. Looking at the traffic cameras linked from the church website it looks like they might have had a little. But in any case it's quite overcast -- he's seeing Woodinville as it is a lot of the time.

How does your garden grow?

Through "a series of unfortunate events" (to crib a movie title) I wound up delivering Kathy's purse to her at the church this afternoon on my way home from work. Dee was working away in the gardens and I have to say I was amazed at the Garden Club's transformation of the gardens since last Sunday. Not that things had been ignored -- they'd already been flowering like I've never seen them flower before, but a tremendous amount of cleanup has been going on this week. Weed removal and much, much more.

I hope our next visiting candidate doesn't get the impression this is how things are year-round. (And the blessed Pacific NorthWet rain promised in the forecast a few days back is now replaced by predictions of more days of "Evil Yellow Face"; it issss, my Preciouss.)

But seriously, the Garden Club is doing a superb job on the "close" grounds. The Mens' Group is going to have a similarly big job in a couple of weeks in dealing with the further ranges of the property.

(A Wikipedia lookup of Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, before composing this post, was a bit of a surprise to yours truly.)

Whew!

Last Sunday Arvalene had asked for a copy of the photo that I posted in the Final Fotos entry. As I was home, recovering from whatever bug I got (flu, I think; hits fast then fades quickly) I thought I'd queue that one up for printing. Except... I couldn't find it. (One of the downsides of being "historian"/photographer is the risk of losing pictures.)

Searched the computer, consulted Ordo Kalendar to establish dates in case it was misfiled, undeleted files on cameras' memory cards... nothing. But I did find that the work laptop had my Helsinki (Finland) photo-set tagged for transfer to the home machine and a while later, realizing it was in the timeframe of the picture I sought, I looked and there it was! Some St. Bartholomew's pictures got mixed in with my Helsinki photos, though they do really stand out, as noted by the difference here between our humble St. Bartholomew's, Woodinville WA U.S.A. and the magnificent Finnish Orthodox Uspenski Cathedral in Helsinki.

"Irregular, with Refrain"

That was the time signature for the opening hymn Sunday which, to my surprise, was Salve Fest Dies again! Wasn't that the same hymn we sang so strongly on Easter? Yet Hymn 107 is listed under Whitsunday.

It turns out it's in the Hymnal twice... almost. It appears also as Hymn 86, designated for Easter, but verses 2, 4 and 5 in Hymn 86 are not in Hymn 107, and verse 3 in Hymn 107 is not in Hymn 86. I wonder how this came about?