At Your Service: Service with a smile

We have worshipped in London and Edinburgh but chiefly in the North-East, from Holy Island to Harrogate and from the beach at Redcar to the top of Pen Hill in Wensleydale.

Quite a lot of churches have been visited twice, a few three times. The sumptuous Anglo-Catholic ceremonial at St James the Great, Darlington, has become almost an annual occasion.

Church leaders are always asked if we may attend, a rather large fly on the wall. Only two, both Methodist, have declined and both subsequently relented - one, sadly, for its closing service.

Methodist chapels have been the principal casualties over the decade, though we have also attended Church of England closing services at All Saints in Shildon, Salutation in Darlington and Denton, near Staindrop.

In reprising ten of the most memorable columns - hands, knees and boompsy - it is possible also to recall the one occasion on which the column was written without ever being inside the church.

It was at St Edmund's in Bearpark, near Durham, a mix-up over starting times meaning that we arrived almost as the service was finishing. The lady of this house swears that a 900 word column was written from the church notice board.

"It was quite clever," she concedes, and from her that is praise indeed.

Morning glory

DURHAM Cathedral, Easter Day, 4.45am. "What are you doing here?" asks the Bishop of Durham, toting a large suitcase around the cloisters.

"Working, what are you?" we reply, resisting the yet greater effrontery of enquiring what might be in so very big a suitcase at such a wee small hour.

Since the At Your Service column first appeared ten years ago this weekend, these Easter greetings have become something of an annual event - usually, aptly, headlined "Early to Rise".

Optimists call them sunrise services; realists, for "sunrise", substitute "dawn".

Over the decade we have greeted Easter on Redcar beach - the sunniest - next to Captain Cook's monument, the coldest, and on a brisk and bracing fellside in upper Weardale, a joint award for windiest and best breakfast.

A very small dog attended the Weardale service, too. Memory suggests that it was called Zaccheus; Bible readers will understand.

We have stood atop Pen Hill in Wensleydale, Easter so late that it was St George's day as well, joined Christians from the Osmotherley area at a 6am service beneath Black Hambleton, jarped paste eggs - Big Enders v Little Enders - with the Methodists of Cockerton, Darlington.

Last Sunday the celebration moved indoors, though there was a point in the two -and-a-half hour service when a "bonfire" was lit in the cloisters and twilight shadows danced mesmerically against those ancient walls.

It was what the county fire brigade calls controlled burning, not the sort of bonfire on which to immolate a November effigy or even barbecue a decent sausage, but splendid and symbolic, nonetheless.

Durham was becalmed, even the municipal Venus fly trap which ensnares unwary motorists on the way to the cathedral in repose at such an hour.

They called the service a Vigil, though it also embraced a confirmation and the first Communion of Easter, full of darkness into light symbolism and of candles for all the congregation. One or two, it appeared, had been burning the candles at both ends. There was the Bishop in chasuble of glorious gold, the Dean, a venerability of Archdeacons. A sleepy little girl cuddled up to her mum, a middle aged chap in a duffle coat periodically closed his eye though only - of course - as an aid to proper reflection.

It began at 5am in the chapter house, lit at the start of the service by candles either side of the lectern and by a single electric light over the door. Well over 100 were seated around the walls, each clasping their unlit candle.

Still it was completely dark, the congregation praying that we might be defended from the perils and dangers of the night - falling asleep on church parade? - before hearing a sequence of Old Testament readings said to show God's saving grace throughout history.

There was Noah and the Ark, the account of how Moses freed the Israelites from Egyptian slavery, the story of Jonah. In more modern and zoologically correct translations, the unfortunate creature in which Jonah finds himself cast adrift is said to be a "large fish", a whale having a throat the size of a 10p piece and, in any case, being strictly vegetarian.

In the cloisters, around the bonfire, the Bishop lit the huge Paschal candle - "set us aflame with the fire of your love" he prayed - solemnly carried thereafter by a woman priest who was little bigger than it was.

Subsequently all candles were lit from the one true light. The long night was over. "Bells are rung and the organ resounds," said the order of service, and while nothing may resound more wonderfully than Durham Cathedral organ on Easter morning, the bells were a carillon.

At quarter past six in the morning, the peace of God extends to the slumbering neighbours as well.

Probably 200 were now present, the Bishop vigorously sprinkling us with holy water. Like everything else which the Cathedral does, it was almost perfectly executed. Their singing still sublime, one or two of the younger choristers did essay a passable impression of sleep walking, however (and one or two of the older ones, an' all.)

There were more readings, a little incense, a stirring rendition of Thine Be The Glory - spiritual Alka Seltzer - which after all these years remains Christendom's greatest hymn. (Another genuflection to the Methodists, O For a Thousand Tongues has pushed Joy to the World into third place, at least until Christmas.)

The Rt Rev Tom Wright, his first Easter as Durham's bishop, spoke eloquently of a world of new life. "Easter is about the transformation of earth by the power of heaven, about working with God to transform his sad and battered old world with new life, justice and hope."

Eighteen were confirmed - 14 from the Cathedral congregation, four from Durham School - Christians of all denominations invited to share their first Communion.

The service ended with Jesus Reigns! Thy Terrors Now, any lingering darkness dispelled by the Bishop on full beam (if the metaphor may be maintained) thanking the faithful as they left.

The eight o'clock congregation, lie-abeds, headed in from another direction.

Whilst one of us was calling it an early day, Bishop Tom had another service at ten o'clock, a third at 11.15. We both get paid for this sort of thing, of course: after the first ten years At Your Service, it is hard to suppose who finds it the more greatly enjoyable.