The weekend went by fast. Monday tomorrow already? Oh dear...
Tonight at Evensong I was playing and singing, with a choir I play and sing with regularly. It was at a church I've never been to, a lovely chapel attached to an art college of some sort.
I really, really like some of the settings we performed. Or prayed. Much the same thing from my perspective.
Talking afterward with some other choir members, someone asked about the reader who had taken the service, and this sparked off a conversation about ordination and various people we know who have taken various holy orders. M who I was talking with was adamant that she had no aspirations in that direction. Not much later she was explaining one interpretation of the Trinity to me, in a fairly sensible and matter-of-fact way, and the funny thing is that it did make a sort of sense. And the touch on the shoulder while she spoke said, "It's okay to be where you are," as much as her spoken words took me beyond where I was. The whole thing took perhaps thirty seconds, we were packing up to go home in a roomful of busy people also packing up to go home, nothing like as intimate as it felt. But it seems significant, enough so that I'm writing about it here rather than going to bed. I felt like, still feel like, another piece of a puzzle has been put into place.
I don't feel I can repeat the explanation, which makes me a bit uncomfortable: I like being able to explain things on intellectual levels. I'm not wonderful with words but I generally throw great quantities of them at a concept until I'm satisfied, and yet there are no words for this and to be honest I barely remember what M was saying.
If I hadn't had the same feeling a thousand times while singing I'd be quite terrified right now.
I don't doubt that I'll continue to struggle with Trinitarian doctrine. I've felt less stressed about it recently than I used to, but it still niggles. But right now it niggles in a slightly different way.
I have no idea if any of this makes sense to anyone other than me.
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2 comments:
the Trinity is like a stack of pancakes. the only decent thing to do is eat 'em.
Blessings Song! I like your niggles.
--mean that in the best way!
the Trinity is like a stack of pancakes. the only decent thing to do is eat 'em.
As far as eating anything in church is concerned, there's that whole not being a communicant member of a Christian church thing in the way...
Glad someone likes the niggles! I don't think I'll ever be entirely free of them. My instinct is always to ask questions, to take things apart and figure out how they work and put them back together again. But the niggles are less distressing recently, the taking-things-apart is less destructive, and I think that's probably good.
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