H-h-hello everybody! For reasons that I will blog, albeit back-to-front, as I've been a bit lax, I've just got back from Mass at St. Peter and St. John's down't road. Using two names for one church building seems excessive, don't you think? The priest, a Fr. Richard Biggerstaff by name, was at the door, so I notified him of my non-Catholic status so that I could receive a blessing without throwing the system into disarray. The service was the most high of the, I think, three Catholic churches that I've been to now. For a pleasing fragrance, incense smells a bit too much like someone's set a can of air freshener on fire. I'm all in favour of liturgy, and being brought up Anglican means there's not even much effort required to know the ins and outs of it, but sung liturgy always confuses me. This is a fact rather than a complaint. Fr. Richard was pulling no ecumenical punches in comparison to good ol' Fr. Paul, with his "Hey, shall we be nice to everybody?" approach to the chaplaincy masses. The homily was on the face of Christ and basically how one can see it in the Catholic church. He used the same trick that Dad did at Southwood - the kid's talk was the sermon, so it involved Q&As with kiddies:

RICHARD: Who's Jesus looking at in this picture?
RANDOM KID Us.
[Lather, rinse, repeat as needed]

From this he went on to say that you could "see" Christ in the Eucharist and in the priest at the Sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession). It was very in-your-face, which is as it should be, at least occasionally.

So after a bit of liturgical trial and error, and then a bit of wandering round investigating the available literature and such-like, I emerged out front. Fr. Richard collared me*, his exact words "Don't go." and remembered who I was from about three and a half years ago, he says it was, when he was the new priest in town, and he came and had dinner with us. He said he was available for chats and such-like, so I may do in my week off, such as it is.