At our leadership retreat last month, there was a request to add an evening services to our virtual offerings. Partly to replace our customary Wednesday contemplative communion, but also out of a desire to carve out time at the end of the day to settle down and find an outlet for our spiritual needs. Several people reported that they found it difficult to set aside time and space for prayer while they had felt stuck inside their homes during lockdown and quarantine. For our first attempt to fill this need, we settled on the Evensong service which can be found in our Prayerbook on page 37. This service format may be familiar to you if you have ever attended our New Year's Eve potluck dinner at the Parish House in the past. For those of you more familiar with the pomp and circumstance of Choral Evensong, this much more scaled back and intimate version contains many of the same elements; a sung psalm, Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis. But for Coronatide, the music is chanted by a sole masked cantor, Alison La Rosa, with sparse organ intonations and accompaniment. So this is a true "back to basics" service that really scales things back to the fundamentals of our Prayerbook. We filmed the service two weeks ago in the Little Chapel, masked, spaced far apart, and with the windows and doors open for air circulation. In a way, we also think of this as an initial experiment as we continue to work toward being able to live-stream services once we return to in-person worship. When you watch the video, you will see that we had 3 separate stationary cameras mounted in each corner of the chapel. As it happens, you actually can't tell from the video that we were all present at the same time, especially after watching all our other worship services, all cobbled together from different locations. Our hope is that once we sort out all the technical requirements, we will be able to live-stream Morning Prayer from the "big church" in a similar way, simply switching between 3-4 different cameras, depending on what is happening in the service. We intentionally made this first effort an "Evensong for all seasons", hoping you will want to return to it as many times as you find meaningful. The whole service is just 15 minutes long. You can choose to watch and listen in any way - perhaps the first time you prefer to just watch, but you can of course also read along from your Prayerbook, and start to sing along with Alison as you get familiar with the chants. Or just listen to the service in the background as you settle down for the evening. We welcome your feedback as we think about future initiatives along these lines. Currently, the plan is to film our Blue Christmas service in a similar format. It is also possible that Evensong could become a regular offering in a recorded or live-streamed format. Heinrich Comments are closed.
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