No one actually said this on Christmas Eve at Holy Moly. But there was a moment when it must have crossed someone’s mind. When I arrived at the church for a quick run-through of some of the music for that night’s service (which included an extra half-hour singing carols) there was a large altar party being walked through its route. There were about 4 times as many people as usual, what with extra torchbearers and other ecclesiastical supernumeraries, and they had a more complicated processional path to follow, in order to end up by the little creche that was set…
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Okay this is going to be a really churchy post, and it requires a lot of background to set up. Saturday, the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago called all the “assisted” congregations together for a pretty much mandatory meeting to discuss a big problem: namely, that the budget for assisting congregations that ask for grants from the Diocese was exceeded by the amount of requests by about $96,000. Rather a lot, really. Clergy and board members (it’s called “Vestry” if your congregation is a parish, “Bishop’s Committee” if your congregation is a mission) were strongly encouraged to attend and give 5…
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I ended up sending an email off to WBEZ and a local newspaper about the following news item, which showed up on the radio, too: NYT: When Christmas Falls on Sunday, Megachurches Take the Day Off Well, minichurches can take the day off too. Holy Moly is.
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So here's what's going on this week around here: Busy at work, but not as crazed as last week. Thinking about sick friends and considering how best to help Keeping only half an eye on the news Fooling around with iPod more (David got me a dock!) Putting off on uploading more photos to Flickr Getting ready to travel again Real Soon (just a weekender) Realizing that there's not a lot of time left Playing catch-up in nearly every area of my life Now that the Weekend of Crazed Running Around is over, I can finally say something about what…
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This is Ginny’s brain, not on drugs, at the end of the work day and on the way to Holy Moly to do some emergency cleaning. As you can see, she is not a happy camper. This was the scene yesterday as I drove away (finally) from work after a long frustrating day trying to keep up with about 4 different accounts’ worth of niggling little problems, ticketing errors, questions, last-minute hotel group changes, and a couple of things that I can’t even categorize except that I now know that I had the information I so badly needed at the…
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Just a note to myself: the sermon at Holy Moly yesterday was on the parable of the mustard seed. I was reminded that my mom has an old silver necklace with a mustard seed in it… it looks a lot like this one. Hers is nicer and probably authentically Victorian, though. I’ll be working on a blog post for Holy Moly on this theme and wanted to grab the image. I’m gathering links volunteer situations for people from Holy Moly to consider working with. We’re going to be coming up with some kind of master plan and I’m supposed to…
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Last week we were horrified to discover that the church’s pipe organ had been vandalized – specifically, the ‘wind chest’ where all the small tin pipes reside. This week, we discovered the perpetrator! Yes, the photo tells it all. No, it’s not the contractor whose name appears on the fragment of yellow yardstick. The case is closed, because the perp turns out to be a nefariously furry squirrel. How do we know this? Because earlier this week, someone that went in to pick up a few things, and while in they: Found this mess of crap and twigs in the…
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Pipe Organ Vandalized So yesterday morning I got to church early for choir practice, and we got started late because the organist ran late, and there were only two of us (Scott the Ineffable Bass and myself) so we bagged on performing an unfamiliar “party piece.” Then we noticed something odd about the metal organ pipes visible in the chest to the right of the organ console. Someone had broken off some of the smallest ones in the front rank with a flat stick. Stewart noticed a bit of tissue paper that shouldn’t have been in there, then he said…
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Photos from Saturday’s car show: don’t know if this Gallery plugin still works… Okay, really it was a fun day but also it was a grueling one; I was scheduled to switch back and forth on tasks and I just couldn’t do it because the other task was much more in the sun. So I made change and tried not to think of how my brain was slowly frying. At one point I misplaced an important list and totally forgot that I’d put it away – no one was more surprised than me when I got home, after figuring out…
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Okay, so I was running around doing errands before the big classic car show (“The Holy Rollers are coming, aiyeee, et cetera”) at Holy Moly tomorrow, and I passed this sign. Now, previously we’ve always been focused on pledges and budgets and can we afford this and that and “we’ve always done it this way” each year, and not really doing much to actually HELP people less fortunate than ourselves. Because to put it baldly, compared with some of the people and charities we’ve been talking about supporting, we’re rolling in dough. Yes, comparatively, and that’s in a year where…