Church stuff

[primeideal]

I mentioned a while back I've been going to a nearby Episcopalian church. Their long-serving pastor retired at the end of last year, after many years of service to that community. The way that things work, both here and in other congregations I've attended, is that an interim fills in until a new permanent pastor is found, which can be a months-long process. The church I grew up in is fairly large, so when their senior pastor retired, the replacement process was kind of long (but they still had other pastors working there so it wasn't a complete turnover). I got the sense that for smaller, one-pastor churches, it might be more streamlined, but that isn't always the case. At the church I attended when I lived on the West Coast, for instance, this became a very difficult and weird situation when people fell in love with the interim and then wouldn't accept the recommended replacement (!) and insisted on hiring the interim full-time instead.

So the current interim was briefing us on the timeline, and it was like, "we probably won't move forward with the search process until this congregation is done 'getting over' the former person, which might not be till the fall." (This feels too long if you ask me, but it could be that small congregations feel like their identity is tied to one pastor, whereas in bigger congregations there's more continuity among the staff?) Then there's a method of kind of prioritizing what the congregation is looking for, I'm familiar with that from other churches, and the search itself could be six weeks or eight months, probably on the shorter side because there isn't exactly a surplus of candidates.

They've been very cautious about covid-related stuff, doing a lot of stuff on zoom and going back to zoom during January because of omicron. (They do have an outdoor space they can use for much of the year, which is one reason why I started attending during the shutdown, that and it's very convenient.) So we're still wearing masks and technically the congregation as a whole isn't doing much singing, although that rule isn't very clear/enforced. So people were asking "what's the timeline there" and the interim's like "well, we have to be cautious, we can't just flip a switch and go back to normal all at once," and it's like...can't we? I mean, eventually, at some point, we do plan to take our masks off? So presumably it'll be one week we're not mandating masks, the next we are? That seems fairly discrete. But maybe if we introduce communal singing very slowly it'll freak people out less? I don't know, I'm unnerved that some of the hyper-vigilant institutions will use this as an excuse to dawdle on lifting restrictions. And I know there are many (many many!!) worse problems out there, but trust me, you don't want me whining and making those about me or my janky bundle of nerves either D:

"So what about communion?" (Right now we've just been having the wafers, no wine.) "Uh, good question. So, the [local/synod] bishop is on sabbatical, so we won't make any changes until after Easter when he comes back." "Okay..." "Also, since I'm the new boss, I'm getting rid of intinction." [dipping the wafer in the wine chalice, as opposed to all drinking from it or having poured out in individual cups or something else.] "..." Like, people were griping (behind his back, on a zoom call) about some very small changes he made to the liturgy (changing some prayers, getting rid of social announcements, mostly because "that wasn't the way the old boss did it"), but are we going to switch to everyone drinking from the same chalice? That seems even less optimal for pandemic reasons. (I wrote a paper about these debates in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century as part of a history of science class I took in college; it's an old argument!) Or are they gonna do the individual cups?

Aaaaaanyway, the punch line. One of the readings today was from Exodus, where Moses goes up the mountain to speak with God and his face begins to shine. (The Gospel reading was the Transfiguration, where Jesus goes up a mountain, his face begins to shine, and Moses appears to him, so Christians understand those stories as related.) In the Exodus story, Moses' friends are afraid to speak with him, because of how he looks. So...Moses gets into the habit of putting a veil on his face when he's not speaking directly with God, so that the others won't be afraid! I wonder how many pastors tried to force an awkward analogy out of that one...