Mud and Holy Supper

I had such a great day on Monday. I felt clear and grounded and balanced. I felt lively and funny and connected. I've been off caffeine for nine days now, and I thought I had finally kicked the dependency.
But Tuesday dawned and it was back to the usual drag and fog. Oh well.
Today is Wednesday, and I woke feeling so tired!

It's gotta be February. It was so overcast yesterday, the sun might as well have not been there behind the clouds. So dreary. The warm weather means we don't even have our usual snow-bright landscape. It's amazing how much brighter it feels with the snow, even under an overcast sky.

Bleah! The teachers are going crazy. All the sleds are stacked by the school door waiting. And the play fields are solid mud by now. No frozen ground. No protective snow cover. The kids' snowpants are for keeping their clothes from getting muddy.

Pout. Grump.

I need to head off to the seminary soon. I will drive through Tim Hortons for a DECAF. Sigh.
The warmth is comforting, even if there is no caffeine hit.

Then GULP ... I'm assisting at the Holy Supper. When I realized what they wanted me to do, I thought, "REALLY?! Are you sure...?" I mean, don't you need to be ordained to do this? Don't I at least need to be a Lutheran?"

In my childhood denomination, only the ordained, (therefore MALES) could administer the bread and wine.

I'm realizing that that is not true in the Catholic Church, and obviously not true in this branch of North American Lutherans.

It's amazing how powerful childhood associations are. ---And how the conclusions I drew about "how the world is" from my childhood experiences, have blinded me to seeing how thing really are. My expectations and assumptions override my actual experience. Amazing.

So it's big for me to do this. The man I'm assisting is gentle and helpful and will prompt me all along the way. I'm not so much nervous about getting lost as being overwhelmed by the feelings that will come up.

I love ministry SO MUCH. I hope I'm not shaking too much to do the job.

I'll be administering the wine. That's particularly huge, since in Swedenborgian thought, the wine symbolizes truth, and where my childhood denomination goes with that, is that men symbolize truth and have special access to it. That's why women are blocked from the ministry, because the ministry is seen to be pretty much all about truth. Since women can't get at truth the way men can (in this interpretation) women will mess it up or contaminate it or hurt themselves by acting like they can.
So for a woman to representationally give truth to the congregants...!
Whoa.

How healing it is that the people here have NO energy around it. It is as normal as breathing.
Wow.
Whoa.