As the construction of the Lange Memorial Organ has progressed throughout the summer, I have been continually awed by the scope of the project, the multiple skills of builders John and Steve Tite and our faithful volunteer crew of St Mark assistants, and the determination over the months by a number of our St Mark women that all the workers be fed royally every day.

I have been playing pipe organs since I was a teenager--until this project, though, I really had no idea what goes into the making of these astoundingly complex beasts.

But now that the organ is almost ready to play, my thoughts are turning toward my comfort zone-- making the instrument sing.

I am gathering a small chant choir of men to lead Lutheran Evening Prayer on All Saints Sunday, November 3, at 4pm.  We will be chanting as much of the liturgy (a combination of Vespers and Compline) as we can manage, and the congregation will be digging into some grand old hymns.

My special contribution will be three organ pieces in the middle of the service, all of them by the late Healey Willan of Toronto and based on famous Gregorian chant melodies that are proper to the All Saints festival. Each is dramatic in its own way, and will demonstrate the Memorial Organ's remarkable array of tone colour.

There will be two more special afternoon services featuring the new organ-- the first on Sunday, January 5, during which we'll sing Christmas music galore; the second on Sunday, March 30-- before its official gala opening the first Saturday evening in June.  And in the meantime, our organist Ted Filsinger will be offering tours and demonstrations of the instrument for both children and adults.

All of which makes me acknowledge, powerfully and humbly: Our new pipe organ is a truly magnificent blessing from God, not just to St Mark's, but to Chesley and everywhere around it. 

Thanks over and over to Him, the Master of Music and Loveliness!

At worship at St Mark's, we've just finished a summer's worth of homilies/sermons/meditations on each of the Ten Commandments-- a necessary task, both daunting and exhilarating. 

The skeptics of the Biblical studies academy, aided ironically enough by the knee-jerk conservatism of their opponents on the extreme wing of the religious right, has pretty well reduced the Commandments, for thinking people, to nothing more than demagogues' politics of convenience. It's hard to get seminarians to take them seriously-- that's the daunting part for me: "With your education, you should know better." But the exhilarating part is the Commandments' continuing relevance-- they're a lodestone of the deepest spiritual wisdom, which is why they're so necessary for contemporary Christians. Taken together, reasonably interpreted, they form a Rule of Life.

Adultery? Still very much with us-- just ignore the patriarchal color (You know-- wife as possession). Adultery always poisons every marriage it touches.

Murder? What about mean girls and bully boys who crush the spirits of the meekest kids on the playground? Or all those dreams so curtly dismissed on Dragons' Den?

Idols? There are lots of them to tempt us. Maybe not graven images here in North America-- but behold the Bible as "God said it. I believe it. That settles it."

Wrestling with the Ten Commandments this summer, as I realise here at the middle of September, has been-- curious to observe-- mentally, spiritually, even physically exhausting. Yet I can't help but feel I've just scratched the surface Sunday by Sunday. And I'm not done yet, because I'm reworking the homilies as essays and publishing them in book form for St Mark's congregation and its friends. 

Will the book be as challenging--and valuable-- to read as it was to prepare?