This joyful Eastertide

For a church secretary, big Christian holidays can be a little stressful. Fortunately, the music director at the church I work at got all his service material to me a couple weeks in advance, and I was able to spread out all the bulletin duplicating and folding over several days, so last week was actually fairly easy. At my own church, I didn't even attend any Holy Week stuff until Friday, though they had something going every evening. Finally the Easter Vigil on Saturday went off without a hitch, though not very well attended.

At the third church I regularly enter -- where I do morning prayer every weekday morning -- they have a tumultuous Easter Vigil service which ends with snacks and champagne. This morning the place was still a mess, with champagne bottles all over the altar. (Yes, you read that right. They do things a little differently.)

Sunday evening I had the pleasure of meeting Marilyn, a writer friend, in San Francisco, where she was visiting relatives. We had dinner, and then she went off to more relatives.