Funny Sunday

I had an excruciating bout of gallbladder pain which kept me awake all but about two hours of last night. Hence, I was not quite on my game this morning when I turned up to work at 7:22 a.m., trudging up to the rectory door in our 15+cm of new snowfall.

Despite the pain and exhaustion, I didn't get a chance to slow down much. I did turn over my parent group duties to the seminarian who usually works with me, and he was understanding that I wasn't up to speaking today. No one else knew that I was still having residual gallbladder pain and felt like someone had stabbed me in the stomach repeatedly. Bah.

We had our first group of youngsters carry up the gifts at the children's mass this morning. Out of the four we asked to come, six turned up (!). We found something for everybody to do and they were very cute indeed. I also got called on to Eucharistic Minister when no one turned up. Apparently the shade of grey my skin was didn't frighten too many people away.

The associate has been trying to be more friendly with me. I raved about the working rehearsal for which he gave me tickets and moments later, he bounded into my office and muttered something in French about an Edith Piaf and would I be interested in her biography. I thought he meant a book, but he returned shortly after with a DVD biopic. He asked if I knew her songs such as "La Vie En Rose" and I didn't have the heart to say not only did I not know her songs or her name, but I thought that "La Vie En Rose" was just a lingerie store. He told me she was very popular when he was "about my age" and thought I would enjoy it very much. I thanked him for giving me something interesting to do this afternoon. I'm not up to much else besides videos so why not. When I popped the video in it was all in French. It took me a minute to realize he can speak French fluently and so he had the subtitles turned off. My French is not that good anymore. The subtitles are now switched back on.

Today marks the start of the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity, so we had a Protestant minister come and preach at two of our Masses. He was speaking to our associate about how we have many things in common, but still too many differences. I guess the curt reply that came was that we would only be able to resolve our differences "when one of us admits that we are wrong." The Protestant cleric recounted this in his homily, and after a pregnant pause, he noted, "I am not here to apologize for anything." Unity indeed.