Today’s early morning ad orientem altar picture

I don’t know how digital cameras pick up so much light, for it really is quite dark out. Anyway, this picture reveals that the scaffolding above the altar is gone and that the angels and statues are back after some heavy construction.

In looking at the picture, I see I’ll have to move the lower candels to the candlesticks next to the tabernacle to get a better symmetry. The gradine that you see also needs more support underneath. It’s now tile on top. The 2×12 that all that sits on needs a gold paint face to it. Don’t know if that needs an undercoating of something.

There is a new sanctuary lamp as well, though I think that may end up moving a bit. To the right, the epistle side, I hope to put up a rather huge “sliver” of red oak as a backdrop for Our Lady of Guadalupe. That sliver, about seven or eight feet high and weighing in at about 80 to 100 pounds, was shattered out of the middle of a gargantuan red oak that came crashing down last year. I’d like to paint some of the slivers of this sliver with gold as well, to mimick the rays coming from the image of the tilma. Do I need an undercoating for that too? That would be difficult.

As you can see, I’m still thinking about how to do up the exterior tabernacle veil. The interior veil works wonderfully. Anyway, things are progressing, so I’m happy with that.

The Holy Spirit for the baldachin over the altar, above the window, will be, please God, a printed out version of the image of the Holy Spirit as a dove that one finds in the amber window in back of Saint Peter’s Basilica. The problem would be getting a high resolution picture and then cropping the picture to exactly the dimensions (though larger) of the end result, which I hope to be a 4′x8′ piece of plywood. Click to enlarge…