In about a month we’re moving to a house in the town centre. An upstairs house on top of the Orthodox church. No garden, no shed, no yard, no cellar (that’s the church’s community room these days), not even a hall except a little bitty entrance that a huge green door opens into.

We have five bicycles.

Read more ...

Some things that distracted me in church today, but didn’t distract from the glory of God, quite the contrary.

• When our priest read the Gospel, St. Lebuinus’ Church across the road rang the bells, probably because their service was just beginning. At the sermon, when the Gospel was explained, the bells rang again, probably because their second service was just beginning.
• At quiet moments during the Liturgy I could hear a blackbird singing. It’s very heartening to think that I’ll be able to hear that blackbird singing much more often when we move into the house above the church in about a month; the window I could hear it through this morning is in our roof terrace.
• A small spider was busy weaving a web between the choir music-stand and the lamp that sticks out from it. The regular page-turner being absent, I turned the pages, careful not to damage the web. The tremor seemed to trigger the spider’s something-in-my-web alarm, because it came running every time I turned a page, but there was nothing I could do about that. I didn’t draw attention to it, because I know that one person in the choir sees spiders as the embodiment of evil and wouldn’t have tolerated even this little peaceful one. At the end of the service, the spider had caught a tiny fly.