Palm Sunday or Passion Sunday
Fr. David writes: The one thing that sticks out in my mind about this week is the number of people who are in isolation who have been making videos or being inventive in different ways. From a couple who made themselves look – very convincingly – like a horse and rider, to a family miming their favourite vacation activities. This says to me people are trying to fill their time! Indeed I got an e-mail from a priest this week which said, “Having more time on my hands I am working on new recipes…” and I thought, ‘What! More time on your hands?’ This is not what I have been experiencing! I won’t say that life is busier for me, more that it involves a lot of new and different things which seem to take longer, so I am certainly as busy as I was before. Therefore this is the only contribution I can make to the silly pictures collection:
But if you do have time on your hands, then I hope that this coming week – Holy Week – you will be able to give some of that time to focus on Christ and the events in Jerusalem that we will be remembering.
One of the main tasks I have in the next few days is to look at our Holy Week liturgies and try to workout what will work well for a Zoom broadcast. I am hoping to do something for Maundy Thursday evening, when we will look at the institution of the Eucharist; something for Good Friday at 3pm when we will obviously focus on Christ’s passion; and on Easter Sunday morning at 9am a celebration of the Resurrection. I am hoping that the diocese will provide a broadcast for the Easter Vigil, and I might leave it to them to attempt that!
But to this Sunday. This weekend we celebrate Palm Sunday which is technically called, “Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord”. I have already blessed our palms. Indeed, standing a long way apart, Rev. Andrea – from Christ Church Anglican Church and Knox United Church – and myself together blessed all the palms for the different churches we cover in the valley. Bp. Gregory has asked that priests don’t distribute palms until after the current situation has ended, thus I won’t be running around giving them out. As our palms are fresh palms, there is the danger that they might rot if tied together in bunches, accordingly they have been spread out on tables in the halls of our three churches to dry.
This means that on Sunday at the broadcast we will focus in on the Gospel which is the reading of the Passion from Matthew, which I will do as a monologue.
Having said that, we do hope to do some improvements to the broadcast this week. The most common feedback we got last week was that when we opened all the mics so people could do the responses there was just noise! So this week we will look for a family – hopefully with more than one generation in it – who will do the responses loud and clearly, and we will only open their mic. In this way we will still get the sense of a community gathered electronically, but it will be easier for people to join in with this one set of voices.
Additionally we have a new camera, which hopefully will give a slightly better quality video picture. And as I write I am also working on the sound to see if I can improve that also. We also hope to have some people reading from there homes, and in this way to start including each of the parishes. We are, of course, looking for volunteers for reading and other contributions.
Finally, I would point you towards something that is happening in Fernie and Sparwood next Wednesday at 7pm. We are going to be ringing the church bells at that time as our way of recognising and thanking all those front line workers who are keeping our communities going at the moment.
I do hope that you are keeping well, and very particularly, I do hope that you will be able to make this coming week a ‘holy week’ in some way or other. Do feel free to share the link below with others, but for security reasons, we ask you not to post it on social media or where it can be seen by people generally on the web.
With a promise of prayers from our daily Mass,
Fr. David
Fr. David is inviting you to a scheduled Zoom meeting.
Topic: Palm Sunday Mass
Date and Time: Sunday 5th April at 09:00 AM Mountain Time
(You can join from 8:45am on Sunday and the Mass will start at 9am)
Join Zoom Meeting
Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 739 161 210
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