Crafty as a Serpent

A knit blog with recipes and theological musings interspersed.

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Location: Portland, Maine, United States

Abby d'Ambruoso is a Lutheran pastor and interfaith chaplain, currently serving in a variety of ministries in Portland, Maine.

Sunday, April 08, 2007

Holy Week is over! Halle-halle-lujah! (sung to the tune of neener-neener-neener)

Oh, this week has been so long.
I'm so glad it's Easter.
That bears repeating. I'm so glad it's Easter.
Not only did Christ conquer death (good news!), but I'm done preaching and leading daily services for the next week or so.
I swear, the Easter sermon was a bit late in coming. "How late?" you might ask. Well, try 2:30am on Easter Sunday. Here's the tale:
Usually, my most effective sermon writing technique is to sleep. Now, this might surprise you, but my best stuff usually comes after I've done my studying up on the history, literary context, language tidbits, yadayadayada... And then I don't think about it at all. I go knit, I go bake, I cook, I go to the gym, whatever. And then I sleep. And when I wake up, something beautiful streams forth from my mind. Usually it is a sermon complete.
Now, I praught (if the past tense of "teach" is taught, why isn't the past tense of "preach", praught?) on Maundy Thursday. And that was fine. My brain is okay with one sermon per week. It percolates around that schedule, and if I moved up the days a bit, it was still alright. The problem came in having a second sermon in the week. I couldn't keep two texts like that in my brain. So I let the Easter sermon rest until after Maundy Thursday service.
So Friday came around. I woke up- no sermon. "Okay, that's alright," I thought. "I'll just take a nap." Still no sermon.
" Okay, don't panic,"I thought. There's always all of Saturday.
Saturday was also the day of the Easter Vigil, in which I sang the 4 page long Easter proclamation. That was fairly difficult for me as I kind of choke when I perform in public (probably one of the surest signs that I am truly an introvert). So I was pretty nervous about the singing. One thing about the sleep writing technique- it only works when I'm not stressed out. Otherwise I get nightmares instead.
So Saturday night after the Vigil I was exhausted. It had already been a long week, and I knew what was coming in the morning (an 8 am service and then Easter breakfast and then the 10:30 service with sermon- the sermon I didn't have yet).
So I went to bed right away, thinking I would wake up 8 hours later with a beautiful sermon.
Instead I woke up at 2:30am (maybe it was the Holy Spirit? God is known for not having the same timing as the rest of us) with a lovely sermon. I wrote it all down in the dark on the legal pad I keep next to the bed just for these purposes, but had to turn on the light for the final sentences. That was the end of the sleepiness. I was awake until 4am.
All this led to a barely coherent me for the 8am service. Oh, well. At least the sermon turned out fine.
Will and I drove to Indiana for Easter dinner with my ex-stepgrandma grandma and my stepdad. And I worked on the second sock for Will. But I also broke another bamboo dpn. I'm now down to 3 and a half. I think it's time to consider metal? Or perhaps the 2 circ method? I'm just not sure. We shall see. The yarn store is closed on Mondays, so I'll ponder it tomorrow.
Happy Easter, everyone!

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1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

No sermon-writing help, but have you tried making your dpns out of doweling?
At least that way you wouldn't have to wait because the "yarn store is closed on Mondays". (And dowels/doweling they are waaay cheaper than already-made needles.)

Nothing wrong with metal dpns, although their slipperiness takes a bit of getting used to. But if you are used to knitting socks with dpns, the learning curve for 2 circs is miserable.

Happy knitting,
Janey
janeyknitting@yahoo.ca

Monday, April 09, 2007 5:08:00 PM  

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