Okay, now that I'm finally fed up with tinkering with CSS and getting Firefox and IE6 to play more or less nicely…
This morning started oddly; David had to take off reeely early in the morning on a sekrit mission (no gurlz aloud) so the morning routine was a little different. He was all "Love you, bye!" and I was all "Whaaa… huh… ::smack smack scratch scratch:: love you too mmm bye."
I don't do mornings very well at all, see. And then all too soon it was time to jump in the car and get to church for rehearsal, since I skipped the midweek one.
When I got there, a couple of my favorite regulars were there with a younger guy at the "greet and sign-up" table. As all three of them are black, I stupidly assumed at first he was a nephew or something visiting from out of town, but it turned out he was a first-time visitor, 45 minutes early for church!
So we welcomed him and made him feel comfortable, chatting while the other choir people wandered in and the choirmistress wandered over to say hello. In passing, he mentioned that he'd just moved to the village, and "he and his partner just moved here, and were looking for a church" and had found us via the new website. A little light went on deep in the lumber-room that is my brain and I thought to myself, "oh, you're going to be just fine here."
He said he wouldn't mind listening to the choir rehearse, and I actually was kidding when I said "well… do you sing? Because if you want to sit in with the choir, you're welcome to join us."
To my amazement, he said "Uh, yeah… I used to sing bass in the Baptist choir in St Louis."
Bingo! We laughed and offered him an out, but the choirmistress was in range and pounced. Next thing I knew, he was hustled off to the combination nursery and choir room with one of the other guys and came back wearing somebody else's robe. Heh. They even got him to fill out the visitor card with his email address, so he'll get the newsletter (I made sure to hand that off).
We don't normally pounce on visitors like that, but something in his manner was just so engaging, it was like laughter between old friends.
He was a really good sport about being choirnapped, I must say. A little shy about singing at first, but he seemed to be having a good time with the "boys" in the back bench.
I've noticed over the years that men in church choirs often turn out to be characters, by the way. Choirmistresses roll their eyes, try to keep order, and laugh with everyone else.
Anyway, they were chuckling and kidding around back there with him (and also explaining how the service went, and which hymn book to juggle). He seemed familiar with some Episcopal norms and forms, anyway.
From things he said, it was clear that the warm welcome we were offering him put him at ease in a lot of important ways.
We had no Eucharist today, because of a tricky scheduling problem. Stephen was off at the Jungian Institute on something to do with his certification (almost the very last thing except for a dissertation defense in June). Paul, another priest assocated with us (I think he's retired) was elsewhere. Manny, a third priest who's part of our community, isn't yet licensed to celebrate Communion (he's apparently still in the process of being received as an Episcopal priest from the Roman Catholic church). And Ethan, who preached, is still at the discernment level, but very far along in the process (he's also Senior Warden).
Yeah, we have a pretty deep bullpen that way, but only Stephen is salaried on a quarter-time basis. I'm not sure what the deal is with stipends for the others, I'll have to look more closely at the financials. I think the others were attracted to this community because it's either a safe haven, or a pleasant place to spend Sundays "off" when not filling in somewhere else in the Diocese of Chicago as a supply or substitute priest.
Anyway, Ethan's sermon today was really engaging and personal and heartfelt, in a way that he hasn't done before – usually, he likes to show how hard he's worked on researching and analyzing the text like a true Biblical scholar. Today, it touched on his background and his whole being or personhood. It resonated well with what we had discussed earlier with our visitor, too. It was synchronicity with capital S.
After we got through the service, which was Morning Prayer with a lot of additional psalms and things, there were the usual announcements – they needed volunteers to make up more grocery bags for the supplemental food pantry ingathering, the rummage sale in July is coming up.
And then our young visitor stood up and said "Yeah… I'd like to announce that I am today's draft pick for the choir, and I'm looking forward to next week. I wanted to thank you all for the welcome and letting me suit up today."
There was a huge laugh from the congregation and applause. He's not a big guy – quite a bit shorter than me – but he looks like he might have wrestled in high school.
During coffee hour, everyone from the 11 o'clock service arrived for Adult Ed and Sunday School, and several of us were helping to finish stapling the food pantry pamphlets on the grocery bags, count them, and stack them up with route maps. As I wandered around chatting and setting up a place to work on the bags, I could see our visitor talking to everyone. He wasn't exactly a captive audience, but he was waiting for his partner to pick him up, I think. He's got an amazing gift for talking to people and making them laugh.
He was still there when I left, happily talking to Stephen's sons about sports and music.
