Ordinary Time.

Ready for our brief dip back into Ordinary Time before Lent begins in a few weeks I have been rooting through the drawers looking at the Green Vestments. Alas, the cupboard was rather bare, so I got this Chasuble out from my drawer at home for use this Sunday. It was given to me by a Belgian acquaintance who plays the organ for Latin Mass chapels in his area. A couple of years ago a Church he went to was going to throw this and others out, so he packaged them up and lo and behold a pile of cloth arrived on my doorstep. This was by far the best thing.

One of my projects in St Hildas over the last year has been to streamline the ordering for supplies as well as simplifying the tasks of preparing the Church for Sunday Mass so that when I go, people will not be thinking 'now, where did he get those from' and 'what do we do with these?'. One of the tasks has been to sort out the candles around all our many shrines, so they are easier to maintain. This weekend sees the installation of the last of the tubes I have been collecting, so that there is no possibility of dripping candles covering windowsills with wax, as happened before. On Holy Saturday we will also replace the last of the large candles with tubes, the big six having been done a long time ago, now we have ordered two 75 cm stocks for the Pavement candlesticks. I personally prefer real wax candles, but our Church is incredibly draughty and we have lost far too many candles recently to draughts which have blown the spent wick into the pool of melted wax on top, thus igniting them as they fall and burning literally through the candle, leaving an expensive mess everywhere. So oil it is, although I have still not recovered from spending a hundred and twenty pounds of Church money on what are basically two long plastic tubes. However, they will save us much money in the long term.