From Your Senior Warden, Jean Burns
What joy it is to look forward with anticipation and hope to Holy Week and, in particular, to our celebration of Easter. As we begin to resume services that more closely resemble normal, care is being taken to proceed with caution. Nevertheless, the Worship Committee, led by Mother Michelle, has in place plans to make this Holy Week as special as it possibly can be. Members of the congregation will be able to sing hymns and the doxology softly behind masks beginning on Palm Sunday and Maundy Thursday. There will be palm crosses for all who come to the service, and even though there will be no choir or palm procession, there will be the traditional narration by members of the congregation of the Palm Sunday reading and a beautiful service. I am so grateful for a priest and an organist who have given so much time and thought to making the week special and meaningful.
I urge each of you to join others on April 1, at 6:00 pm for the Maundy Thursday service, which concludes with placing the holy sacrament at the Altar of Repose, contemplation and silence, and the stripping of the altar. For me this has always been an especially sacred time of thoughtful contemplation. The Good Friday service at 12:00 pm is a traditional liturgical service without the Eucharist, but includes the solemn act of venerating the cross, which has had to be reimagined this year. As people enter for the service, each will be given a small wood cross of olive wood, a symbol of the traditional act of veneration that cannot safely occur this year. All, contemplating the death of Christ, will leave in silence.
Joyfully, the week concludes with a new beginning, Christians’ most important celebration of the year, Easter, the day of our Lord’s resurrection. The bell will ring in triumph both before and after the service. The congregation will sing hymns, the doxology, the Lord’s Prayer; the priest will chant the liturgy; the congregation will receive the bread. The altar will abound in beautiful lilies and spring flowers. No church is more beautiful than St. Paul’s on this day! May each of you, your family, your friends and neighbors join us at St. Paul’s on this holiest of days as we celebrate together.
- Jean Burns, Senior Warden
This Week at St. Paul's
Mother Michelle Walker
Dear St. Paul's Family,
Since Jean offered such a lovely overview of Holy Week, I will add to this newsletter only a couple bits of practical information.
This week Tom Konieczny and I spent some time measuring pews. We discovered that for the first 10 months of the pandemic we have been overly cautious by seating people 9 feet apart! The CDC only recommends 6 feet of social distancing. We discovered this while contemplating potential Easter seating and how we might be able to seat 55 people, our maximum capacity. (55 is 25% of our fire marshal capacity, and the guideline established by the diocese for this phase of the pandemic.)
After conversation and consultation with the vestry, we decided to revise our two center aisle pew rows to the 6 feet of distancing recommended by the CDC, while maintaining our previous 9 feet of distancing on the side aisles. We're doing this to offer those individuals who appreciate the greater distancing an opportunity to continue to feel most secure. If you prefer one of these seats, please let the usher know when you arrive for service. We will maintain those as long as they are being used. We want everyone to feel secure in their worship.
We also learned, from a trusted medical professional, that COVID is not transmitted by contact (it's spread via the respiratory track). Now we have lived for more than a year with the fear of contact transmission, so we have no intention of reducing our efforts to keep the church clean and avoid commonly touched services. However, we will likely sneak the Hymnals and Prayer Books back into the pews if for no other reason than that is where they belong. Please don't feel intimated by this AND you won't be required to use them in the near future.
Don't forget we resume singing this Sunday. Tune up your vocal cords, wear your mask, and let's enjoy the (soft) singing voices that have been resting for far too long!
Lastly, I plan to send a short newsletter on Tuesday for next week. Look for that. I hope to see you Saturday for clean-up day and Sunday for worship!
Wishing you a blessed Lent,
Mother Michelle
priest@stpaulslaporte.org | 219-575-0226 (c)
PS. Invite someone to church this week, in-person OR virtually. Go on our Facebook page and share our events or the video I recorded inviting people to church (https://www.facebook.com/stpaullaporte/videos/427378468327695). Now is a great time for us all to practice our evangelism skills!
So you're not surprised, the signs designating which pews are available for seating have been moved from the middle of the pew to the far end.
Revised seating chart w/ 6 ft social distancing in the center and 9 ft on the sides.