Scenes from a normal weekend

My rector texts me a photo taken as I was praying the Eucharistic Prayer the previous Sunday while he was away on the Holy Mountain.

All I could say was, that is a lot of orans.

I should probably reel it in.

I won’t, though.

Sunday morning. I’m greeting a parishioner whose first language was Welsh; she learned English with a Home Counties accent, thus baffling my generally reliable UK accent radar. (Digression: I was once speaking with a priest—now a bishop—in the Scottish Episcopal Church who spoke Posh Southern English. When I learned that he grew up in Liverpool, I asked him why he sounded like a Londoner. He replied, “Oh, they beat the Scouse out of me at school.”)

I said I should probably at least learn how to say good morning in Welsh. “Bore da,” she said, which is easy enough. How about “Good night”? That’s “Nos da.” Also easy. Good afternoon? “Prynhawn da.”

I told her I would have to avoid speaking to her in the afternoon. She thought that was funny.

Saturday evening. I have been struggling with page proofs for at least a week longer than I should have been, but neither my heart nor my mind has been in it. I finally take the indefensible shortcut of trusting two authors who had clearly read their proofs carefully; I declared victory, sending off the whole corrected typescript in time for dinner.

At brunch after church the rector’s mother gives me a picture she has printed out and framed for me. It shows me bidding the Peace.

More photographic evidence that my liturgical gestures are awfully big.