I wanted to write about how the Ökumenischer Kirchentag was, among all the other things it was, a feast of diversity. But I got distracted.

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Services sung: 9
Services to go: 0
Time: 0:30 Total: 3:45 Grand total: 20:02
Congregation: about 30
Beards: 5 Headscarves: 4
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, 1 adult acolyte, 1 teenage acolyte Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 2 basses
Coordination: splendid (but then everything seems splendid today)
Tunefulness: ditto
Strangeness: after the service, someone noticed that there were rather a lot of Greeks in the church and we hadn’t sung the Greek troparion, so Choirmistress consulted with Fr T and he did all the verses again for us to sing the Greek troparion to.

Services sung: 8
Services to go: 1
Time: 3:15 (that’s very fast) Total: 3:15 Grand total: 19:32
Congregation: a multitude at the beginning, still half a multitude at the end
Beards: many Headscarves: lots
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W (who was hearing confessions almost the whole time until it was time for the priests’ Communion, poor man), 3 adult acolytes, 2 teenage acolytes Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 3 basses (er, 2 baritones and a bass; one of the baritones sang tenor some of the time)
Coordination: everything from seamless to chaotic
Tunefulness: Easterly
Voice: splendid, apart from the fit of hiccups, probably from swallowing air while singing very fast and loudly
Strangeness: isn’t everything strange at Easter? We had so much fun in the choir that Fr T remarked on it in the altar. And one of the altos can read in Portuguese on a proper chant tone!

Services sung: 7
Services to go: 2
Time: 3:05 Total: 5:40 Grand total: 16:17
Congregation: steadily growing from 6 to about 30, lots of children. Families came especially to see the church being made white.
Beards: 7 Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, Fr Deacon P, three adult acolytes and a teenaged acolyte Choir: 5 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 1 bass
Coordination: er, this service is chaos
Tunefulness: mostly okay
Strangeness: In the middle of the Epistle the reader had a fit of coughing and Choirmistress took over. When Fr T came out to bless the reader he said “Peace be to you both”— a nice touch! Talking about blessings, Fr T didn’t give the final blessing until we’d sung “Father, bless” a second time to alert him to it.

Services sung: 6
Services to go: 3
Services at which I was the only alto: 1
Time: 2:35 Total: 2:35 Grand total: 13:12
Congregation: about 12
Beards: 5 Headscarves: 4
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, Fr Deacon P, three adult acolytes (the teenagers were doing dishes at Choirmistress’ house) Choir: 5 sopranos, 1 alto, 1 tenor, 1-2 basses (one bass, another choir member’s partner, was summoned especially to sing the Canon)
Coordination: surprisingly good considering how tired we all were.
Tunefulness: we didn’t even go very flat on the Lamentations.
Strangeness: Either Fr Deacon P naturally has a very loud voice or he hits the acoustic sweet spot of our church exactly, the way I miss it exactly and nobody can understand me; either way he sounded way too loud until Choirmistress slipped him a note “softly, please!” After that it was just about perfect.

In the middle of the Canon I suddenly realised what this Holy Week is about (I agree completely with Father Stephen: “Throughout the week there will be verses from a hymn or some other small phrase that I’ll not have noticed before — that […] will redefine the day or take me somewhere I have not been before.”) and couldn’t hold back tears. This year it’s about the humanity of Christ. For the first few days I already suspected it might be that: from all the readings and texts He appeared to me as teacher among His disciples, Man (as opposed to God, not as opposed to Woman) among the people around him, suffering in His human body. The words that finally drove it home were something like “even in the grave His two natures weren’t separated”— as human as He was, he carried his God-nature within him all the time. No wonder the grave couldn’t hold Him.

Services sung: 5
Services to go: 4
Time: 1:15 (and about 20 minutes to venerate) Total: 6:20 Grand total: 10:37
Congregation: I estimated 40, Prima estimated 80
Beards: at least 7 Headscarves: 5
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, two teenaged acolytes Choir: 4 sopranos, 3 altos, 1 tenor, 1 bass (back from Russia just in time)
Coordination all right, except that Choirmistress clean forgot that this is the service in which I usually do all the readings because of the sung Alleluia verses, and gave the readings to the reader with the stronger voice who didn’t know how to sing them.
Tunefulness: mostly okay, even excellent in places, except the thing at the end for venerating the icon of the Grave— we’re always so tired that we can’t keep the pitch.
Strangeness: Well, not singing the Alleluia verses. I thought for a moment that the sung verses had been abolished without anybody telling me, but it was an honest mistake.

Services sung: 4
Services to go: 5
Time: 1:55 Total: 5:05 Grand total: 9:22 (did I add up wrong, or have we really had 17 minutes more than in 2008?)
Congregation: 8 or so
Beards: 4 Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W, one adult acolyte Choir: started out SAT, gained another soprano and another alto (Prima) during the Third Hour
Coordination, tunefulness, voice, knees: nothing remarkable
Strangeness: The choir-book was still in beta, so every now and again someone (usually the person who happened to be reading) noticed a typo and someone (not always a different person) made a note of it on the page. I took the book upstairs after Matins and made even more corrections.

Services sung: 3
Services to go: 6
Time: 3:10 Total: 3:10 Grand total: 7:27
Congregation: between 6 and 12 at various times
Beards: 3 (briefly 4) Headscarves: 3
Crew: Altar: Fr T, Fr W and an acolyte; all of them in fact outside the altar. Choir: 4 sopranos, 2 altos and a lone tenor.
Coordination: Better than this morning, much better than last year. We did accidentally skip one sedalion, a pity because it’s the one I like most of all (the text, that is; it’s a normal one in the 7th tone, not very difficult or interesting).
Tunefulness: so-so; the Beatitudes ended up somewhere in the cellar of our voices.
Voice: normal.
Knees: feet and buttocks, really. Most of the choir sat down at some point. I didn’t really have a place to do that so I leant against the wall.
Strangeness: I wrote a few years ago, somewhere I can’t find at the moment, “Pilate is a wimp” because he has Jesus in front of him, finds no fault with him, but then goes with the flow and fails to let him go; but this time I really listened to the Gospel of John (John 18:29-19:16) and realised that Pilate keeps trying to release him but is hampered by pressure from the multitude. Perhaps I’ve been roleplaying some more kings and nobles in the meantime, so I can imagine better what it’s like to be in that position.

Services sung: 2
Services to go: 7
Time: 2:22 Total: 4:17
Congregation: about 10
Beards: 6 (all but one of the men present) Headscarves: 2
Crew: Altar: Fr W (Fr T couldn’t get the day off from teaching), Fr Deacon P (late because of traffic), 2 adult acolytes Choir: 8 (4 sopranos, 3 altos and a tenor)
Coordination: Shaky, because the clergy wasn’t consistent— they’d never served together before. But we pulled it off eventually.
Tunefulness: Well, when we had a pitch, we tenaciously maintained it.
Voice: okay
Knees: starting to feel them
Strangeness: An acolyte who wasn’t actually acolyting tried to light the chandelier, but he got such a large dose of resistentialism that it took him the Vesper hymn, two prokeimena and almost two Old Testament readings to get all the candles lit.
Also, just as Fr Deacon P was reading about Peter, “before the cock crows”, the neighbours’ cat mewed loudly on our roof terrace which has the church’s skylight in it. Later, at coffee. Fr W recalled it, saying “before the cat mews”— which will probably make me remember it forever.

Services sung: 1
Services to go: 8
Time: 1:55
Congregation: about 16, who came in eight by eight, some were on time and some were late.
Beards: 4 Headscarves: 2
Crew: Altar: Fr T and his son the acolyte. Choir: 5, for a while 6: SS(S)AAT.
Coordination: good, with some small glitches like singing “Alleluia” four times instead of three.
Tunefulness: excellent
Voice: okay
Knees: those didn’t bother me, but calves and feet did after almost the whole day in the kitchen doing eggs and pascha and prosphora.
Strangeness: The Gospel in Matins immediately follows the opening troparion, without a prokeimenon in between; on the other hand there’s a dangling prokeimenon in the First Hour without anything following it except the rest of the Hour. (I had issues with the dangling prokeimenon two years ago, too.) Also, I think this was the first time ever that I’ve announced “Kontakion in the second tone”.

A bunch of us hung around for quite some time after the service taking away the spent candles, changing the black draperies for white, and talking planning-style talk (also talking about my new glasses; they’re rather obvious). This might be a “don’t want to leave” Holy Week. Eventually we all said “now I’m going home”— and found that it was raining.