Oyster Stew & St. John Evangelist
Several posts on FB last evening after our final Lenten Wednesday service at Holy Nativity Episcopal Church. Each Wednesday evening has been different. Two were our regular Wednesday evening worship, and after supper a short program about something related to Lent. Two were special worship services, one a Taize’ service; last evening we celebrated Lenten Wednesday with the Great Litany and Holy Communion, all chanted traditionally and well-done, and the FB posts of Stacey singing The Lord’s Prayer (Malotte), OMG. One parish where I was rector, we started singing that version of the Lord's Prayer every Sunday, the congregation singing it. I don't remember which parish that was, but they loved it.
My part last evening was reading the gospel lesson, and at the last minute sitting there looking through the worship bulletin I remembered many services of High Mass when without exception the gospel was always chanted. -- No, come to think of it, we had a service of Solemn one evening at Lutheran Theological Seminary, Gettysburg in the 1980s and the professor assigned the gospel had refused to chant it, which I thought was chicken -- . At any event, just before our service started last night, cloud of incense wafting through the building, I started humming a chant tone and decided WTH, why not, in thirty-something years I chanted many, many services of Choral Eucharist as celebrant, but never chanted the Gospel, go for it. So, did you see that doddering eighty-year-old priest making a fool of himself last night wobbling through a gospel chant? Wobbling, or warbling.
We have no Lenten Wednesday service etc next week because of spring break, but this has been, to my mind, our best Lent yet. With excellent and plentiful soups. Last evening including a superb chili, dark brown and most delicious chili in my memory; a crab soup that was beyond scrumptious, even had the traditional bottle of sherry there for a splash and someone accusing me of having crab soup with my sherry; and Linda’s world-famous oyster stew that she makes just that once a year with a gallon of oysters and a gallon of cream and a gallon of milk and secret ingredients that we’ll never reveal because they change every year and we can’t remember them.
This year the Apalachicola oysters came from Louisiana because Apalachicola Bay has been harvested extinct by greed and folly and the need of many small-town folks with a boat and tongs to make a payment on their pickup truck. So anymore, rolling in from Louisiana and Texas, maybe Alabama too, large trucks with refrigerated vans arrive loaded with sacks of oysters, and unload at the oyster shucking houses. There, the shells are opened and the little creatures scooped out into containers marked Apalachicola, Florida. In fact, I’m having six of them grilled on toast this very morning, my all-time life-long favorite breakfast. Well, that or fried mullet.
Realtime videoing and posting bits of church services is a new thing, excellent.
I neglected, probably wisely, to mention that I think Lazarus, not John, wrote that gospel and was the Beloved Disciple. Matter of fact, I'm certain.
I neglected, probably wisely, to mention that I think Lazarus, not John, wrote that gospel and was the Beloved Disciple. Matter of fact, I'm certain.
TW+