Last week we missed church. It wasn’t on purpose: it’s because we couldn’t find the church. Having not actually gotten the address of the church in Columbia Falls before we got out of wi-fi range, the usual methods didn’t work: in the phone book, it’s just a PO box shared with the rest of the cluster, the building isn’t in the middle of town, we never saw the blue-and-white sign, and only one person we met had the slightest idea of where it might be. By that point the service at every other parish was well under way, so any Luteranische backup plan fell through too.

This week, though, we are in Great Falls, and Incarnation on 3rd Street North has its service at 9:30. So if I can just get the kids up, we’ll be there. And unless the rector has been struck by lightning in the past year, I know what we’ll get: Rite II, straight up, with hymns sung with the organ and a sermon that is entirely devoted to the text. Indeed, it will be very close to a 1979 Rite II, which is to say, the practices will be close to those of thirty years ago. When it says “prayer”, people will kneel.

For me it is a great ecclesiastical vacation. One of the things that has become a great trial back home is that when I visit another parish, I’m never sure what I’m going to get. And I don’t mean the maybe three parishes in the whole state using a missal instead of the BCP. It’s that I can show up to a suburban parish and not be entirely sure that they are going to include the Lord’s prayer (it has happened to me), or whether I’m going to get hit with one of those abominable-if-not-heretical Father-free liturgies. Out here even the liberal priests (who are numerous) do their liturgy pretty straight. Of course, there’s not as much room for experimentation out here: a really big parish has an ASA of over 100 and only two cities have two parishes. Great Falls used to have two, but St. Francis at the east end of town closed a few years back due to reductions at Malmstrom AFB. The state population has been declining. But for now, it’s a respite, where I don’t have to frisk the celebrant for theological eccentricities.

As it happened, they had morning prayer at Incarnation today; the rector has just had an operation and is down for the count for a short while. It is perhaps a symptom of the age that the senior warden could not actually say why the rector wasn’t there, though apparently my wife and I seemed to be the only people who did not know in detail the nature of his illness. (Something about employee medical confidentiality)

So it’s a month later, and I’m on the New Jersey shore for a friend’s annual party. The logistics of travel are such that I’m staying over Saturday night, so I’m looking for a church for Sunday morning. So I do what any modern fellow does: I start looking at church websites. Several possibilities are summer chapels, and one appears to be closed for the season; another is too early for a post-party service, at least for me. The leaves me with regular parishes, and the closest (whose name I will forbear to give) has a website that gives off bad vibes. And it rather bothers me that I have to vet parishes like this, but these days, especially in liberal dioceses, it has to be done. Fortunately the parish I did end up at was vigorous, and crowded, if not especially friendly, and the sermon wasn’t odd. The liturgy was odd, but that’s because it was from the 1889 BCP.

another is too early for a post-party service

<grin>

Well you know, wherever there are four Episcopalians…. not to mention a lot of Jersey shore Catholics. We’re more of a beer crowd, though consumption is way down since we’ve gotten older and a few of the more, um, ambitious drinkers have gone on the wagon. So we only killed a quarter keg of Yuengling.

It’s actually kind of funny: at one point in the afternoon, mid-party, my friend’s mom asked me if I was still an Episcopalian. She lives in Ligonier, PA, and it turns out that St. Michaels Ligonier was one of the parishes that refused to follow Duncan into ACNA. Mind you, it’s still a quite conservative parish.