They Also Serve Who Only Stand and Wait

So we ran mass today. The woman from the parish council who normally does it was off in Siena on holidays. We had the intro (me), the prayers of the faithful (all the children) and the second reading (Herself).

She read beautifully. As she was reading, “There must be no competition among you, no conceit; but everybody is to be self effacing. Always consider the other person to be better than yourself..”, I was whispering to her father, “She’s so good at this, she really is superb at reading aloud much better than anyone else.” So very much taking the message of the reading to heart, then.

They all did fine for their prayers of the faithful but after delivering his, Michael went to the back of the altar where he appeared to believe he was invisible and began rotating in circles.

But what, you ask of my couple of lines of introduction, well, I went into the sacristy and told the parish priest that I would be doing the introduction. “Fine, fine,” said he. When mass actually started, I was surprised to see that someone else entirely was saying mass but I assumed that the parish priest had passed on the message. I went up to the altar and stood at the lectern opposite the priest. The elderly priest opened mass with a welcome. Then he pressed on completely ignoring me. I stood there opening my mouth like a landed fish and failing to get a word in edgeways. Eventually I slunk off the altar without saying anything still completely unnoticed by the priest who was well into his stride at this point. Why do these things always happen to me? Predictably, the children thought it was hilarious