The Great Blessing

It's been a funny old week.

This week's intensive course was 'Race Awareness'. It was a good course, aimed at making us aware of the issues facing ethnic minorities in this country. And it did that. It's just a pity it took 2.5 days to do so.

With that out of the way I could now focus on 2 things - firstly Greek (our teacher Mark was pleased to recall a conversation with a startled member of staff who was surprised that we'd all passed our pre-Christmas test and there had been no dropouts all term!).

Secondly my 'Life and Service' essay on 'the Dulles Model of Church'. I'm convinced there's a spelling mistake and there should be an extra 't' on the end of that second word. Some guy called Dulles analysed loads of churches and decided that a good church has a balance of 5 elements. I've got to analyse a church I am familiar with against this model and given that I'm not intimately familiar with that many churches I've picked on one in Ferndown. Against some definitions I have to decide to what extent does it identify as an institution (partial tick), as a mystical communion (partial tick), as a sacrament (tick), as a servant (tick), as a herald (tick). 1000 words written this afternoon, another 1000 needed before Thursday.

And on Thursday afternoon a regular meeting of the students where the most exciting things we could find to talk about was whether it was OK to wear academic robes in college. Passions rose high but I couldn't get excited about it. It's like those meetings we used to have at work where some executive had travelled halfway across the world to talk to us about the state of the business and somebody would ask a question about the repainting of the bike sheds....

Back to the title. Tuesday night was Federation Worship, and this week it was the turn of the Institute of Orthodox Christian Studies (IOCS) to lead. IOCS are the only people who seem to be quite distinctive about the style of worship that they share with us - all other houses of the Federation seem to dumb down their distinctiveness for public consumption, but IOCS doesn't hold back. 55 minutes of incense, recited and intoned liturgy, choral led responses, and much sprinkling of water, as we celebrated the Great Blessing of the Waters (i.e. Jesus' baptism).

It was one of those occasions which I'll remember for a long time as it was so different from my normal experience, but I'm quite happy for it to remain an occasional experience - it's a bit too late for me to defect, and I can't chant well enough.