The Lord is My Shepherd...

Regular readers of this blog (if there are any) will recognise the words of the Alpha Invocation from an earlier post:

From the unreal, lead me to the real.
 From darkness lead me to light.
From death lead me to immortality.


So this morning I went to a Sung Eucharist service at a new church. Even though I had a pretty good idea what to expect from a "High" Anglican service of Holy Communion it was very different from what I've been experiencing on a weekly basis for the last four years since I returned to regular church attendance.

That said I experienced an almost euphoric sense of relief when the service began with the announcement "we will begin with hymn number xxx" - I honestly hadn't realised that I'd missed having hymn books at church since we started having all the song words projected in a PowerPoint display.

Thankfully I have sat through Eucharist services before so I unlike my very first time when I attended a lunchtime Communion service at Portsmouth Cathedral as a Fresher I didn't do too badly with keeping up the regular liturgy, the collect and readings for the day and when to open the hymn book. I was only wrong-footed once by not realising we were singing a hymn immediately post-Communion and not reciting sung liturgy.

I almost had one of my emotional moments when I realised that the collect of the day was Psalm 23

"The Lord is my Shepherd, therefore can I lack nothing...(or for those familiar with The Vicar of Dibley "I shall not want")

One of those coincidental moments of feeling that the Lord had left me a little calling card to confirm that I was in the right place.
I should explain the personal significance as that Psalm is incredibly well known.

I first encountered them as a schoolboy chorister when I was about 17. Later in October of the same year, 1996 I heard them recited and spoken about during the funeral of my Great Aunt (on my Dad's English side) and that was pretty much the moment that made me want to explore the Christian hope and whether it could have any personal significance.  Within a month of that I'd started going to church regularly, taken Communion for the first time and become a Christian.

I did almost have an "oh dear" moment when the Gospel reading from Matthew was the parable of the wedding banquet but thankfully the Rector cut to the chase by talking about the real meaning of playing one's part in "The Greatest Story Ever Told" and being involved in Church life. The passage includes the rather uncomfortable section in which one of the guests who is not wearing a wedding robe is bound hand and foot and thrown out "into the outer darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth"- thankfully rather than focusing on the most literal interpretation,(for which the most famous example is the fate of the character Ignorance in Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress) the Rector chose to interpret it as a warning to beware complacency. Certainly a timely message for me as I start a new phase in my Christian journey.

After the service I had a cup of tea and a pleasant chat with a few people, at least one of whom recognised me from my association with the local operatic society and another lady whose son was at junior school with me some years ago

To sum up, I will be going back in a fortnight as I'm helping at a Doctor Who convention next weekend. (Have I mentioned that I'm a Doctor Who fan? Oh well, that's another cat out of the bag. More on that soon!)

For many are called but few are chosen. (Matthew 22.14)