The 21st Sunday after Pentecost

The recurring theme of the day was St. Francis, a reminder of why he's still going to show up in Andalusada: his fingerprints are too large to leave out. This morning's processional was a singing of his prayer ("Not to be consoled but to console...")

I was kinda dreading the sermon, because the speaker is a touch more liberal than I am. (Ironic for me to complain about liberalism, seeing as I'm almost certainly to the left of her.) I dreaded, as it turned out, in vain; it did have that certain taste to it, but although she didn't say the word it was a pretty good summary of kenotic spirituality, which really brought to mind what I wrote earlier this week. (And while I'm hesitant to identify the theme of Mark that way, I will defer to it because not only do I no longer remember how it was defined, but I haven't read the Gospel of Mark enough to know any better.

The one thing that threw me was the concelebrating priest, a guest from a sister parish in Haiti. He was the first Gospel reader of the day; I say "first" because there was a second reading, immediately after his own, to offer a translation. I have never heard Haitian Creole spoken before, and struggled to pick out the words that I could recognize through a patois Mme. Eigen would've graded harshly had I spoken remotely like that in 9th-grade French.

The congregation was less sparse than last time. The songs, no less beautiful.