Summer Ball, Minster and Abbey

This has been a summer term of special events. The year end fell yesterday for many undergraduates, with a ball to finish. Going alone, although unsettling at the outset, was an excellent way to enjoy the event. I lasted from 8 p.m. to 3 a.m. during which time I got to do exactly what I wanted. I managed a hundred or so conversations by the end of the night. The dancing was good in parts, the best bits being 'Dancing Queen' and 'Blame it on the Boogie'. An early morning gloaming lit my way home. I decided to have fried eggs at 4 a.m. for breakfast in my kitchen while glancing over the rooftops as first light fell on the Minster.

Last weekend it had been the installation of the new dean of York Minster, which was colourful and joyous. Being centred round a service of evensong lent an odd simplicity to the grandness of proceedings, with processions which took ten minutes and far too many robes to be of much use. I felt deeply connected to seventeen centuries of Christian history in the City as I participated in this most peculiar and ancient rite.

The oddness of that service neatly complimented a rather less grand occasion two days previously in the magnificent Norman ruins of Rievaulx Abbey where plastic garden chairs served as pews and a folding table as an altar for the eucharist at which the Archbishop of York presided. We were having a thanksgiving for the sixty plus years the sisters of the Order of the Holy Paraclete (OHPs!) had given to the village until their departure this year. We sat in the roofless nave, with a local brass band sited in the remains of the south transept. It looked like there would be heavy rain during the first part of the service, it kept missing us though. As soon as we got to the 'Lamb of God', just before receiving communion, the temperature dropped and light, soft rain began to fall. Once everyone had received communion it stopped again. During communion the birdsong became very loud, it was a striking moment, with stunning views across the open valley with the steep valley sides full of decidious trees now in their late spring fullness adding to me catching a sense of the earth being 'full with the grandeur of God'.