Roshi's ramblings

Hello everyone, in this weeks post I'm going to be talking about the basics of my placement.  What it is, where it is, why I'm doing it and what it involves..  What is a placement? A placement is a church you attend at the behest of your diocesan director of ordinands that has been agreed upon by them and the Bishop.  How long it lasts is different depending on your previous experience.  For me it is going to be 3 months, taking me through one of the busiest times of the Christian year - Christmas. Where is it? I am attending and helping out at a benefice of rural churches.  St Mark's Dolphinholme, St Peter's Quernmore and Christ Church Over Wyresdale.  These are the churches run by my ADDO and they are roughly 15 minutes away from one another. Why do it?   When you are exploring your vocation in the Diocese of Blackburn they like for you to have a placement in a church outside of your own tradition/circumstances so you can see a broad range of Christianit

One of the Harvest displays The view up the chancel   Hello everyone, in today's post I'm going to talk about the services I attended at The Priory in Lancaster.   The church is a beautiful building and I arrived on harvest festival day so it was decked out with various harvest-related items made by the groups associated with the church highlighting what they do to help provide for those in need, or how what they do can link in with food.   The services were brilliant, in my tradition of Anglo-catholic with the bells and smells approach.  I found it interesting that the thurifer didn't carry the thurible in the procession, carrying a sceptre instead, the reason being the smoke could irritate asthmatics. The services were also accompanied throughout by a 25 strong choir, the first week I went it was the men and boys, the other week was men and girls.  It meant it was a truly sung Eucharist with almost every prayer being accompanied by their powerful vocals.  I

How I feel at the moment!  Hi everyone, I'm currently super super busy with everything going on in my work life as well as in my religious life, but I don't want to abandon this blog so I'm going to make a conscious effort over the next couple of weeks to get some more content written. It'll also help me reflect upon everything going on and give me a chance to take a step back! So throughout October I went to the Priory in Lancaster, it's a beautiful church and it has a full 25 person choir male, boys and girls. Naturally that means the services were sung and sung beautifully. It showed me what can be done with a willing, we'll trained choir.   I'll talk more about it in another post, all I need to do now is stop being tone deaf so I can sing along too! A very interesting and thought provoking book I've started attending a bible/book study group of 20 to 30s and we are studying a book called 'Too Busy Not To Pray' though sadly I