With mia_mcdavid at her weaving class again today, I went to Church alone. Rather than go back to St. Christopher’s, or to one of the other local churches Mia has been writing about, I drove down to Northfield, for the Palm Sunday liturgy at All Saints Church. Our former Senior Associate Priest at St. Christopher’s is now Priest-in-Charge there. She has her own show now.

….And she is doing a great job. The church was quite full. It was evident minutes into the liturgy that she is quite comfortable, more relaxed and happy than I had seen her at St. Christopher’s for years. It quickly became clear that the feeling is reciprocated. They love her there. Next time I visit I am going to downplay the fact that I am from her former parish….they don’t want any suggestion that a connection from the cities might draw her back.

It was the best worship experience I have had since leaving St. Luke’s/Evanston, back in ’97. In fact, it seemed like a minaturized St. Luke’s–this is a much smaller church in physical size. But there was lots of sung liturgy, including sung prayers, and superb music. It was a fine Anglo-Catholic liturgy, without the misogynist and homophobic baggage so often associated with that wing of Anglicanism–again, just like St. Luke’s.

I noticed another friend there. One of the choir members, who was the narrator for the passion Gospel and later led (chanting) the prayers, is a Carleton friend. He graduated 20 years after me, but was also a Carleton folk dancer. We met at the ’97 College reunion, where some of us old farts from the early ’70’s dragged out the old folk dance records, and found ourselves joined by these dancers from 20 years later, who told us that the Carleton folk dancers had survived, and had records and pictures going back to our day. Since then folk dancing over all the decades has been a regular Carleton reunion feature. Generally growing old sucks, but being treated as a tribal elder is kind of neat :-)>