Blue Maundy Thursday

Today has been a wonderfully blue day - not in the sense of dismal, but simply because blue sky prevailed from sunrise till after 8pm. And yes, it was also Maundy Thursday, of which more anon. 

It's been an exhaustingly full day too. We were up and doing earlier than usual, because J had an appointment on the Other Side (yes - a ferry journey, the first in months!). I did three loads of washing which completely filled my whirly and which all dried completely, right down to the bamboo socks which tend to linger damply when all else is dry. I threw out all the rubbish I'd been trying, successfully, to ignore, and put all the bottles and jars into their bins ready for recycling. I even bleached the draining board ...

I went to the dentist. My own dentist. I had an appointment with him a year ago, just as lockdown began, and it didn't happen. And in all my dental traumas in the summer, I saw everyone but him. But today, because a persistent niggling pain which I couldn't pin down, he offered me an x-ray at a few hours' notice. No infection, no obvious damage - probably sinus. Relief all round. 

And then a glorious walk along Loch Striven, blue under a paler blue sky, surrounded by golden gorse and pale yellow furry catkins and luminous daffodils. And oyster catchers, of whom I offer you two, posing with a pair of seagulls on the rocks near the oil depot pier. We had to rush a bit to get home in time, because we had a church service to attend at 5.30pm.

Last year we had to forgo all our Holy Week services and have them online instead. Our church was locked and out of bounds. Easter fell into the pit of strangeness that had engulfed us all. We were numb. This year, we can have limited services in church - constrained by the need not to have the people who clean the church practically living in the building. So we had a Eucharist at the end of the afternoon, as if the Passover meal had been held at teatime and the visit to Gethsemane carried out in the early evening sunlight. And we had no Maundy Watch, kneeling in candlelight into the cold night. We had a powerful sermon, and organ music to carry us out from that Last Supper.

And later, reflecting, I realised that it is never really possible to relive the past - the thrill of discovering the wonder of the first few Holy Weeks in a new tradition. We shouldn't even try, we who have lived through decades of that particular journey. The memories are there, glowing down the years, and every year will bring its own discovery. 

But I shall never forget the time, so many years ago now, when I came out of the silent church after the frozen dozing like a failed disciple in the cold candlelight and saw, framed by the tall trees, the trail of the comet across the sky...