Do you ...?

There was a wedding today.

There are lots of weddings in this parish of late. I usually like to do the rehersals the night before, so that I get a chance to meet other members of the families, but invariably as I wait for the beginning of the wedding itself, there's a bit of anxiety because the society we live in doesn't seem to have too much regard for time, especially when it comes to weddings.

True to form, we started late today too, but as family members were running around prior to the commencement of the Nuptial Mass, I came to understand that the groom's parents are all musicians, so they were concerned about getting the sound system set up just right, and that the soloist is a teacher who has also been entrusted with pastoral responsibilities in the school where she works.

As it turns out, I had no need to worry, because these were all people of faith, accustomed to the rythm of the liturgy. The anxieties I had beforehand were more of my own making than of their conivance, and given the fact that there's an entire hour (and a bit more) between the end of the wedding and the next commitment here, perhaps there was a lesson here to be learned about not getting too uptight about the ways in which I am called to be stretched because of the human element that is oh so present in the work I do ... within limits of course.