A week ago (June 7) our Rector at St. Mary’s Episcopal Church preached on The Earth, the Holy Eucharist, and Us. Later in the service she consecrated not only the bread and wine for the service, but also bread and wine for us to take away and consume at some worship event outdoors during the summer. She had prepared a liturgy for us to use. As far as I can tell, and having read Dix and other such works I consider myself to be something of a liturgy geek, all of this is theologically OK.

Anyway, mia_mcdavid and I decided to have our celebration when we were camping with colgaffneyis at the Olde World Renaissance Faire this past weekend. For an altar we used the woodworker’s workbench that I have been building:

For an altar frontal we used a plaid that mia_mcdavid had hand-woven in the Ulster red tartan (which is period — c. 1600 — for colgaffneyis):

Afterwards we took some pictures of our group, rotating the photographer. Obviously, the photographer is not present in each picture. We did not have the equipment for time-delayed photography. Here are a couple of these:

A (in the blue gown) and D (in the purple slashed doublet) are fellow members of colgaffneyis. A commented afterwards that this was the first time she had ever received communion at a carpenter’s workbench. The taller bearded gentleman is Master James of York, whose bookstore is one of my favorite features of this event (somewhat to the detriment of my bank account). We had a delightful exchange (relevant to this post) last year.

Here we are afterwards:

We did this after dinner on Saturday night, so the Emmaus Road Gospel reading was particularly appropriate.