Holy Week 2021...on the road back to "normal"

This is a shot I took of our Easter service as it began. I'm not sure how the odd focus happened (dirty lens?), but it made a neat effect!

As a church musician, Holy Week is always a bit of a logistical challenge: there's a lot more going on, more musicians to coordinate, and it all happens in a pretty compressed timeframe. Traditionally, at the church I serve, we do a Spring Cantata on Palm Sunday, we have a Tenebrae service on Good Friday (which incorporates music and drama), and Easter Sunday has more (and bigger) music than our average service. Last year, of course, was really unusual, as we were in full "lockdown" mode in our area, so we were trying to create meaningful musical and liturgical content with a team of about ten people. This year was a big step back towards "normal," but still an interesting challenge.

At our church, we have been offering in-person services (with social distancing protocols in place) and a pre-recorded YouTube service at the same time, for the past several months. This means that, for Holy Week, we had to put together and pre-record a bunch of special music for the three services I mentioned above, and work out how the live versions of those same services would work. As it turned out, we had some tremendously rewarding and inspiring services, both online and live. Easter was particularly interesting, as we decided to have an outdoor service, in order to accommodate the larger attendance numbers we expected. (It's a good thing we did so, as we had about 4 times the number of people we've been getting at our live services for the past many months!) The Easter service was a joyous event, as the weather ended up being lovely, not too cold and not too hot. 

So now I take a breath, relax for just a moment, and then jump right back in, as we keep moving forward on this road out of the odd coronavirus landscape we've lived in for the past year.  Each Sunday seems like another step forward on that road. Happy Easter to everyone reading! May you have a joyous season, living in the light of the Resurrection!