Advance posting as I am away at an Ash Wednesday Quiet Day with our local C of S ministers in Dunblane - a welcome pause before the Lent events begin.

I am looking forward to Lent, Holy Week and Easter for all sorts of reasons.

I am intrigued to see how the Lent studies work, using material I've used before, but with people I am just beginning to get to know.  Might need a few bleeps when we show the film on which they are based (1980s Yorkshire miners at their expletive best!) but it should be good fun.

I am pleased that there are folk who enjoy leading various aspects of the Lenten offerings, and Holy Week especially promises to be excellent with a balance of giving and receiving rather than the all-out-rush of recent years.

Each lunch time of Holy Week we will offer a 15 minute 'pause point' on the road to Calvary and each evening our Cof S friends offer more formal services.

Maundy Thursday will be a Tennebrae organised by some of my folk (a relief cos I've never done one and wouldn't know where to begin!) to which I am looking forward as a time of reflection and stilling.

Good Friday will be a sort of labyrinth thing, using materials I have developed, made, copied, whatever over many years.  A multi-sensory 'drop in' Easter Encounter suited to all ages and hopefully appealing to folk who aren't (yet) part of the church.  Then a quick trot to the cathedral (piskies) for the Easter Vigil three hour service.  Two very different opportunities to enter more deeply into the story.

Easter Sunday will probably see us "communioned out" (with apologies to all the sacramentalists out there!) with early breakfast, Easter Celebration and evening Emmaus Walk each including some form of communion.  Of course with my low, memorialist (or super high sacramental-universe) theology every meal has eucharistic potential so thrice in one day is fine.

Exciting and inspiring, lively and leisurely, light and heavy, slow and fast, long and short, experiential and cerebral, ecumenical and denominational... I think we have most options covered one way or another.

Advance thanks to those who are making it happen in such a lovely diversity of ways.