Another twenty years on moment

With thanks to Louisa.

A little while ago I wrote here about Holy Trinity, Benalla.  While that was a decisive experience, it was a passing one, as my family moved to Melbourne a few months later.

Where Benalla provided a really strong stimulus to regular involvement in the life of the parish, backed up with quite a remarkable standard of worship, it was St Peter's, Eastern Hill, that really formed my outlook as an Anglican.  It was here that I encountered some of the continuing strands of my life for the first time -- rich worship, high musical standards, an expectation that parish activities should be life-enhancing.

I was a regular parishioner at St Peter's for about ten years, and have turned up there on and off in the intervening decade.  I was part of the servers guild for a while, doing duty on Sundays and Tuesday evenings, and later as assistant organist.  When I first arrived, my regular seat was in the place no self-respecting Anglican would willingly occupy -- front row on the right hand side.

I went through my teens in the parish, and there were quite a few people who encouraged (or suffered) me -- among the dead, I think here of Ted and Mary, a wonderfully devout and quirky couple who had no end of interest in what I was reading, thinking, or observing.  Then there was the head server who inducted me into the mysteries of carrying a banner without knocking into the front of the gallery, which way a figure-eight procession should turn on a festival (as distinct from a penitential procession, which goes the opposite way), how to handle books, cruets and lavabo dishes, the correct manner in which to genuflect -- all the stuff that goes into being an effective liturgical factotum.  His phrase to cover all degrees of impertinence or disorganized thinking was "now don't go jumping the gun like that," delivered in a truly mouthwatering Yorkshire accent.  Everything I learned about serving in the sanctuary became high-level insider knowledge when I migrated to the organ gallery.

It takes all types to make a church.  I met most of them -- ranging from the desperately solemn to the seriously funny, down to the simply crazy.  Perhaps the most inscrutable of these to me was the Anglo-Papalists, a strange band who found it difficult to avoid constantly crossing Gisbourne Street, which does duty for both the Tiber and the Thames in Melbourne.  Some would take alternate weeks serving at St Peter's and not serving at St Patrick's.  One or two made the jump and converted, only to return later on before disappearing again.  I often wondered why this was so, until I saw what went on over the way.  Poor St Patrick's Cathedral comes across like an outpost of Sydney Anglicanism compared to the spike shop over the road.

St Peter's has figured in my research, as well.  My masters thesis looked at A.E.H. Nickson, which meant I had a deeper engagement with the historical forces acting on the parish ethos.  It was an element of connecting with St Peter's in a new way, since I'd left the place a few years beforehand to become assistant organist at Christ Church, South Yarra.  Part of that initial leave-taking was going 'cold turkey,' picking up on the different ethos at CCSY.  St Peter's was the place to which I turned when things were difficult at Christ Church, Brunswick, and it became a temporary staging post before I came to my present work in the Anglican Parish of Jika Jika.