Ten-Finger Exercises

Behind the scenes in church

We had two beautiful worship services today, at 8 o'clock and at 10:30. The bishop was in town, so everything was a little 'gussied up,' to use an old term of my mother's. (Gussie was a tennis player who played Wimbleton wearing fancy underwear that showed from under her tennis clothes.) Probably not a very fit term to describe a service, except that the lace on the bishop's sleeves did make me think of it.

I made a mistake in setting up the service book on the altar and set it to Rite I instead of Rite II which we were using. We had used Rite I on Wednesday for a funeral. The most noticeable difference is the older, more formal 'Thou' and 'Thy' language.

The Bishop, who is a kind man, took it all in stride, paused a minute and reset the bookmarks to where they should have been, except that he used Prayer A and the bulletin said Prayer B. No big deal. There were a couple of other errors on the bulletins as well because of an emergency that had had the office staff in a bit of a tizzy during the week, and there was the big funeral Wednesday.

The 10:30 service was full, with a large choir and a string ensemble, three baptisms, seven confirmations, and several people being received into this branch of the church. It was a very festive service.

The priest had directed me to reset the book for the second service using a preface for baptism and Prayer B. So I did that. Then I noticed, during the service, that the 10:30 bulletin listed Prayer A. Sigh. So the bishop made the announcement this time, rather than changing the book. But he must not have expected the baptism preface, even though the service had been baptism and confirmation, and flipped through the book again to get to the Easter preface since we're still in the Easter season.

I doubt if anyone noticed that either. Nor did they notice that the two lay readers were out of town and we quickly (on the way down the aisle!) drafted the priest's wife to read a lesson, and a choir member who is also a layreader to come help serve communion. Instead of just reading the gospel, I read two lessons and the prayers.

What other glitches were there? I was supposed to pour the water into the baptismal font, but the priest got in the way and had to do it himself. Several other little things of that sort all worked out okay.

The reasons it sticks out in my mind are: because the bishop was here, and the priest is such a stickler for telling me exactly what to do. He has told me before how much trouble he and I both would have been in had we been in his former diocese in New York. In that case, thank God, literally, that I'm not in New York.

On a funny note, a priest in the congregation who had not noticed any of this, related a story that happened to her in Coventry England. She was in procession and a bishop suddenly prostrated himself on the cross that's part of the floor. (I picture a design in the tile or some such thing.) The rest of the clergy followed suit, prostrating themselves as they reached that spot. Later they found out the bishop had just tripped!