69/365 Checklist Stream of Consciousness

Rose is the color of this Sunday. I have to put up something rose to accent the purple. But after the reconciliation service, which I need to attend. Sophia? I don't know if I can swing that. But I'll be there. And I figure something out with the pink stuff.

Then almost immediately I have to do red banners for Palm Sunday. so much red in back, that should be no problem at all. I'd love to add something to that. I have this compulsion to create these days, something that was gone for a long time is back. The house is almost all the way clean, everything but my room. My room is always last. That says something.

Easter flowers. Have to call Fiona....done. "Does Lynn ever get on your nerves?" she asked.

Banner. I know what I want to do. I don't have enough interesting whites to do it. I have the blue and red and some other things. Now is the time. Do it. No. First, finish up the red for Palm Sunday. Eee.

Purple down, red up, red down, white. Easter is exhausting. I hope Leo is feeling better by then or this will do me in. That whole week of hurry up and wait. And the stones. There are no stones for the font. I don't want to use concrete. But I can't spend my life driving through North St. Louis stealing cut stone. Lynn. She isn't going to come through on this and then is going to complain about the result we'll have come up with because she couldn't come through on it. At least that morning Jack, Miguel, Hildegard, and I can put it together and have enough emotional distance from it to laugh.

Easter season is so dang long to keep flowers alive.

Banners will have to be semi-reversible because they hang. Thinking. I love thinking about this. I hate thinking about finding cut stone to build a temporary font.

Glow in the dark strips for the side steps. I wonder if stars will do. I have those in abundance. They really glow. I'll have to try it out. Hmm.

74/365 Banner over me is love

Do you remember that song? Was it from Hi God? Peter built the church on the rock of our faith, his banner over me is love.

I have some work to do. Palm Sunday is take down the purple, put up the red. That's only a few moments away from now. Then for Holy Week, the red comes down and nothing goes up until Easter Vigil, when the color is white.

We're not using my banner from last year, which is fine with me. I've hung it in my guest room/sewing room over a vinyl cling on the wall that says "No rest for the talented." Ha. But we're using a banner, or rather a series of banners, for Easter.

Ones I have to make. And not just solid fabric hemmed on the side and dropped down from the choir loft. I'm quilting again. I'm excited--I have the plan drawn up and I am confident that I have the skill and patience and dexterity to pull it off--and the materials since I've been to the fabric store.

Now I have to find the time. Come on Leo. Give me the time.

85/365 Banner thoughts

They will be white, right? Easter is white. But the ones I saw that I liked had lots of color. Lynn didn't like the green in the last one. I guess there was a lot of green. I saw it as dawn. Reminded me of the Art Museum short film with the woman who broke glass with a flower stem. This shattering of natural things, this crash, this change. But that's ok because it looks nice in my guest room.

Six banners in a row, 10 inches wide each. How long? Did I bother to measure the red ones? Dang it. I guess I'll go up there next week. I would have loved to have started from those white banners from last year. I brought them home. I wonder if that will work.

Pippolotti. That was her name. The woman who made the movie at the Art Museum.

Water and fire. Fire from water. The water, round like the earth. Fire, wild, above, unpredictable. How much red? How much yellow and white? The water--blue? I think I'll start with whatever batiks I have and think about it.

Panic hasn't set in yet. It will soon. Triduum, though. It's designed to make you crazy.

91/365 To Do

Holy Thursday, 2010

*Finish banners, at least get everything sewn down--tomorrow finish edges and sleeves

*Make something for the potluck. S-Z is vegetables this time. Asparagus?

*Schnucks for egg dyeing materials

*Get lesson 1 done in dylexia book 4

*8:40? I have a note that says set up for Holy Thursday but is that done?

*Make a plan for Saturday's decorating: font, stones, PLANTS (when to buy? Friday? Today? TODAY) Crap. Flowers, banners, who is coming?

*Find lemon cake recipe

*Mail package to Erin

*Try not to fail

93/365 My morning, my triduum

Friday night, Good Friday, I got to bed at 2:30. But they were done. Hidden in those stitches are scenes from the DVD I was playing while I worked, which always happens to me (my Christmas banner is Law & Order Season 5, for instance). I look at quilts or knitting later and remember the music or movie or TV that was on in the background. I should probably plan better and watch/listen to meditative things. But I don't--I keep part of my brain amused and offline while I work with other parts. This banner was done with Sports Night on in the background--an Aaron Sorkin show about people who make a nightly sports show on a cable network. It doesn't sound like something I would like, but two out of three episodes find me in tears even though I've seen them a half dozen times already.

So I crawled into bed at 2:30 and slept like a rock until my alarm went off at 8. I help prepare meals for the homebound three times a year--Thanksgiving morning, Christmas Eve, and Holy Saturday. The events officially begin at 8, and run until the folks who are delivering the meals show up about 11. Then there's clean up afterward. On Thanksgiving and Christmas Eve, I get out of there at noon. But Holy Saturday is the day to decorate for Easter so I split my time between meals and the church.

I took Sophia with me because she wanted to help. We counted containers and cupcakes. I chatted with friends and people I know only through this ministry. I like doing this because I'm not in charge. I ladle sweet potatoes into foil containers and enjoy the banter. I commiserate with Sr. Vanda when she rolls her eyes at a participant who will not stop talking. "All the time, she always has something to say. And look at me, it's Holy Saturday and I'm saying that." But nothing is mean-spirited.

Sal the janitor pops in and out to have his conversations with us. He talks to Astrid about being a server. He talks to me about church decorating. Sal is developmentally disabled and lives across from church with his family--I think he's probably about 60, and our church is his life. My relationship with him has changed over time--my part of it has, I mean. He comes to every church decorating moment and fusses around ("hedgehogging" is a term I might use, looking busy without really being busy). This day, Sr. Hildegard has him doing dirty work with candles and candlestands. Soot and wax and who knows how many years of neglect. "I bet he regrets ever saying he'd come up to help," she says to me. But after the vigil mass, downstairs, all he can talk about is how dirty the candles are and how nice everything looks now. "We done good!"

Fiona arrives midway through the morning to deliver flowers for church--she works for the florist we order from. She has me come with her with a rectory key to drop off flowers for Fr. Miguel. "He got you flowers, too," she tells me, and I think she means the several dozen flowering plants for church. Then she hands me a vase with my name on it. Sometimes. I show the card to Astrid, who sighs and says, "I guess we can keep him!"

I have some time--the cooks are standing around drinking wine at 10 in the morning and I tell Sr. Vanda I'm heading up to iron some. I'll be back. I iron the banners, worried that the red isn't balanced enough ("But that's nature," Hildegard points out). I take them upstairs to unfurl (I like that word). Hildegard helps me straighten them out--for whatever infuriating reason, I cannot maintain a straight line over 12 feet of fabric. I pin here and there at the top, and get them to the point that they seem about right.

I go downstairs to look at them for the first time. Rina Yoon would be proud. They're so dang big. I sat up in the sanctuary surrounded by all the disparate parts that will become Easter at our church, staring up at the choir loft.

And everybody loved them. That is important to me, of course, but more than that, I think I finally got a handle on Easter. The fire, the water, the circle, the earth, change, transformation, surprise. Jack said he thought it was the best thing I'd done. I think I agree. Miguel said he knew what he saw in it...but didn't elaborate. After the vigil mass, Paul told me he was glad he had 50 days of Easter to ruminate on them. Bev couldn't stop telling me how astonishing they were. It was a good moment.

The vigil was long and dark and just right. The church was set, as Hildegard had told me, and we got out of the way so Christ could step in. It was Easter, after Triduum. In many ways.

94/365 Easter Morning

128/365 Corpus Christi

Sal's in church when I get there this morning. He's setting up the kneelers for the wedding this weekend. "Setting up" means randomly dragging them out into the sanctuary. There are 4, but many couples only use two (or none at all). But he drags them out every time. I'm there to take plants away so that the bride's flowers don't clash. Whatever.

"Hey Bridgett!" he says, like always. "We did good with the Easter decorating."

"We did, you're right," I say, putting Leo down so he can look at the font.

"Pentecost, I guess we'll put up the red and white banners?" he asks. If he means the felt ones with all the words, the answer is no, we threw them away ages ago. But I just shake my head. "Oh, ok. I'll help take everything down after Pentecost," he offers.

"That would be fine," I agree. "Some time that week we'll work on it."

"Have you heard about Corpus Christi?" he asks. I hate finding things out from our mentally disabled janitor. Sometimes, though, he knows things first. It's a mystery.

"No, what about Corpus Christi?" But I can tell on his face he doesn't have any news. He pauses.

"Are we going to have Corpus Christi?" he asks, trying to be more clear.

"Well, yes, Sal, we'll have Corpus Christi." It's on the liturgical calendar. It's not optional.

"Nobody told me about Corpus Christi," he shakes his head like he's suspicious of my answer. "Are you sure we're going to have Corpus Christi?"

"Yes," I say more definitively. "Everyone has Corpus Christi."

"Ok, Bridgett, if you say so."

I've never been happier to see Gillian walk through the door.

132/365 Rumination on an old Worship meeting

I don't remember the exact words, but it went something like this. It was last Easter season, or maybe the one before that, and Miguel had just read the gospel for the coming season for us to reflect on before we started our meeting (which seems to happen, and then not happen, depending on the month, or maybe on the attendance--sometimes we reflect, but other times he reads, or has someone read, and then that's it. And sometimes that's good). It was, I believe, the gospel when Thomas isn't in the upper room when Christ appears, and he doubts, and then is proven wrong and all that.

Resurrection became the topic. Hildegard mentioned something along the lines of resurrection being a mystery, how Christ was resurrected but changed--he wasn't the person he had been before. The disciples didn't recognize him on the road, for instance. And then Hazel at the end of the table, who rarely spoke up about anything, just sat listening (and sometimes I think judging, but maybe that's just me being terribly self-conscious), said, "OF COURSE he's the same person. He's flesh and blood. He ate fish on the beach!"

At that moment, and pretty much every moment since, I thought about how ridiculous that statement seemed to me. And then I though about how much I didn't care. About how my faith isn't bound to what form Christ appeared in after his resurrection. For that matter, the resurrection isn't too key to my faith. Voskreseniya. It's a mystery I don't spend much time thinking about.

But what I have spent too much time thinking about was this interchange between Hazel and Hildegard. Why is the fact of the gospel story so important to some and so inconsequential to others (not that I think it's inconsequential, but I think some folks can debate, doubt, reassess, and grow in ways that others just can not)? I wanted to cry out at that meeting, "Why? Why does that piece matter? When you are considering the Word made Flesh, why are we so concerned with the latter part? What about the words?"

But of course, it being Worship Commission, I did not.