THE ANGEL OF GREAT COUNSEL

On a high and lofty peak in Kerkyra, there is a monastery ... much, I fear, restored. But it still has the encouraging dedication of ho Hypselos Pantokrator ["the lofty ... high up ... Ruler of All"].

It was, apparently, founded in the fourteenth century.

In the vaulted ceiling, to the West of the Ikonostasis, there is painting of ho tes Megales Boules Angelos; words which the bi-lingual guide-book helpfully translates into English as ... er ... "the Angel of the Grate Will" (I'm not making this up).

I think I discern here what our Roman Rite's Third Mass of Christmass ... what we term the Missa in Die ... calls, in its Introit, vocabitur nomen eius magni consilii Angelus [LXX kaleitai to onoma autou Megales Boules Angelos]. This Third Mass is the great dogmatic statement of what, on that Day, we are celebrating, with its majestic readings from Hebrews and the Gospel According to S John. 

The image on Corfu shows our Blessed Lord. He has 'angelic' wings; he is raising his right hand in [Byzantine] blessing while his left hand holds a globe; in his halo are the letters making ho on [the One who Is]; at the top is written ho tes Megales Boules Angelos. 

I am reminded here of the majestic words of our Canon of the Mass, where we beseech Almighty God jube haec perferri per manus sancti Angeli tui in sublime Altare tuum,  in conspectu divinae majestatis tuae. I have long regarded this Angelus as being our Lord Himself. 

Jungmann reminds us that so did Ivo of Chartres (d 1116); Honorius Augustodunensis (early twelfth century); Alger of Liege; Sicard of Cremona (1155-1215) ..."and others" ...

These words in the heart of our authentic Western Eucharistic Prayer are one of the elements that make it, both among the ancient rites of Christendom and the horrible novel inventions of the 1960s, so distinctive. This prayer, like the reference to the Sacrifice of our Patriarch Abraham, mentioned just before, makes a mighty link with what Jungmann calls "the concept of of the continuity of the history of grace" ... which is why Abraham's sacrifice was one of the favourite subjects of ancient Christian iconography. 

I feel an interest in this parallelism between the Corfiot mural and the authentic teaching of our Canon. Perhaps somebody with more knowledge than I sadly have of the Byzantine side of this Tradition could supply information or comments?

POOR OLD IRELAND!

The Magdalene Laundries ... the treatment of Fallen Women ... what a cruel and depraved island Ireland was! Poor old De Valera ... Poor od Archbishop McQuaid ... what a corrupt, hate-filled society they ran!! Apologies ... Compensation ... but what good is all that? It is not much better than words.

The Times recently published a review of a new book. The Reviewer asked: "How surprised would you be to discover that a comparable system operated in Britain during the 20th century?A system that has not been acknowledged or apologised for, let alone compensated for?"

The book is The Undesirables The Law that locked away a a Generation, by Sarah Wise. It does for Britain what so many 'revelatory' books have done for Ireland. The British law concerned was not repealed until 1959.

Alice O'Keeffe, the Times Reviewer, enables us, in more ways than the merely statistical and legal, to understand the social arrangements in Britain and Ireland in their contexts. The origins of the British 1913 Mental Deficiecy Act Act "lay in the Eugenics movement of the ealy 20th century. Alarmed by the poverty in the slums of Britain's big cities, this group of keen social Darwinists decided that the best solution would be to prevent the poor from breeding ... As the eugenicist George Mudge put it: 'The stunted individuals are not the product of the one-room tenement, but the one-roomed tenement is an expression of [their] inherent incapacity'.

"The Eugenics Education Society was founded in 1907 and found a sympathetic ear in Winston Churchill, who once wrote that 'the improvement of the British breed is my aim in life'. Influenced by an American book called The Sterilisation of Degenerates, Churchill, when he was home secretatary in the Asquith government, advocated a simple surgical operation ... The working-class Labour MP Will Crooks observed that such people 'are almost like human vermin. They crawl about ... polluting and corrupting everything they touch.' ...

"As Leon Whitney of the American Eugenics Society observed: 'Many far-sighted men and women in both England and America have been working earnestly towards something very like wht Hitler has now made compulsory' ..." 

What thoroughly wicked old men De Valera and Churchill were to have lived in a culture different from ours!

And how about all those Metropolitan Archbishops, McQuaid in Dublin and, in England, Fisher and his successors? I spent nearly half a century in the ministry of the Church of England, and I know all about the phrase "Giving a man another chance". And my own ministry was overshadowed by a bishop called Peter Ball; because he was an alumnus of the College I worked in, he used to hang around it inviting the (male) students to "Give a year to Jesus". Another of his phrases was "Be strong for Jesus." This meant "Let me whip you." 

It was ... literally ... decades before he was finally convicted and locked up. "Cover ups", indeed!

POOR OLD ENGLAND!

Palm Sunday

 I have something to put before you. But before I do so: Thank You for your Good Wishes. Pancreatic Cancer is not the best daily companion, but your prayers and good wishes really do help.

Presumably, it is not wicked to canvas views on liturgical changes. We had a lot of those between about 1910 and 1970; and, it seemed, we never stopped talking about the subject, like IV Formers discussing Girls (or Boys). But, strangely, we seem now to be within what one of my doctors calls stasis. And 1970-2024 seems a long time to be static, as well as silent, especially compared with those decades of incessant, officially encouraged change, which I have lived through!

I think Palm Sunday is the least successful of the liturgical confections devised for the post-Conciliar Holy Week.

This is because of the disparate sources out of which it was put together. 

(1) We had the assurances of fashionable Experts that the Essence of Palm Sunday was the Procession with the dramatic use of palm leaves ... everything else was to bow down before that, as if it were the Mikado's Daughter-in-law Elect. 

(2) We had the earlier lectionary choices made with Holy Week and Passiontide as the guiding principle, centred upon the Matthaean Passion Narrative, in mind. 

(3) And we had the old, Western, popular notion that those leaves, so neatly folded by those nice foreign ladies, would be sacramentals powerful to keep safe homes in which they were on view. Quicunque ex ea receperint, accipiant sibi protectionem animae et corporis : fiatque tibi, Domine, nostrae salutis remedium, tuae gratiae sacramentum ... omni adversitate effugata ... and vide the similar sentiments in all the old five prayers of blessing. 

I never have felt that all these elements have worked comfortably together.

Might we be better off with just two main options: (1) a joyful, popular celebration based upon the Lord's entry into Jerusalem and the use in Procession of the palm leaves; and (2) a celebration closer to the spirit of Holy Week, centred on the proclamation of the Matthaean Passion Narrative.

Reconsideration of Palm Sunday would, of course, be accompanied by the suppression of all those successive rites of the 1950s and 1960s and 1970s, leaving just the pre-Pacellian formulae for that Day, and the couple of new choices.

I think a lot of people could be happier.

Ave Crux ...

Well, Easter ... the paschalia festa ... are now peracta; the ancient collect of today, Low Sunday, makes that explicitly clear. But, for our strange Novus Ordo brethren, this same ancient collect is now attached instead ... believe it or not ... to the Saturday of the Seventh Week of Easter ... so, presumably, they regard that Saturday as end of their Easter Octave. Seems a funny business to me, but I'm sure that they, poor poppets, understand their own massively peculiar rite better than I do. Anyway, this is not my real subject for today.

As we leave the Easter Octave behind, we have some unfinished business. Lady Day, the Annunciation of our Blessed Lady, needed to be moved out of Holy Week, the Maior Hebdomada, so we celebrate it tomorrow, Monday. It is therefore next Tuesday that restores the normal rhythms of the season. And, as I peer into my 1874 Breviary, in my survey of the liturgical sources and habits which fed the piety of S John Henry Newman, Fr Faber and those heroic early Oratorians, Wiseman and Manning and Ullathorne and so many ...

... there I find this rubric: "Afterwards, there is the Commemoration of the Cross, which happens daily at Lauds and Vespers, up to the Ascension ... other Commemorations, of S Mary, S Joseph, of the Apostles, of Peace are not said in the Easter Season."

Is it strange to commemorate the Cross during Eastertide? 

I think not. The risen Saviour who comes to greet us is the Crucified One bearing in his limbs the marks of his love. The Feast of the Inventio Sanctae Crucis will beautifully emphasise this; but, with an early Easter this year, May 3 seems a long way off! 

Easter certainly does not cancel out the Crucifixion or diminish the splendour of its Five Wounds; it exhibits them to us as glorious and salvific ... and draws each of us into their wonder.

At Lauds the Commemoration was: 

Antiphon: Crucifixus surrexit a mortuis, et redemit nos, alleluia, alleluia.

V Dicite in nationibus , alleluia. R Quia Dominus regnavit a ligno, alleluia.

Deus, qui pro nobis Filium tuum crucis patibulum subire voluisti, ut inimici a nobis expelleres potestatem: concede nobis famulis tuis; ut resurrectionis gratiam consequamur. Per eumdem. 

At Vespers, the antiphon was Crucem sanctam subiit, qui infernum confregit, accinctus est potentia, surrexit die tertia, alleluia. The V, R and Collect the same as at Lauds

That Johannine Crux!! (6)

In the Resurrexio Domini, we find that it distressed Mary of Magdala that she could not 'see' Jesus (rak na'n guela). But after a little dramatic teasing, the Gardner, 'Ortolanus', "demonstrabit latus eius ad Mariam Magdalenam et dicit ..."

"Maria, myr ov Pym Woly!/ Crys my the wyr the thasserghy ... " Mary, See my Five Wounds! Believe that I have truly risen again]. ..."

As with S Thomas, the sight of the Wounds is found convincing. And the Magdalen desires immediate engagement. "A ker arluth eth yn grous pren./ thy'm ny thogouth amme the'ethpen./ Me a'th pysse a lauasos/ lemmmyn amme vn wyth the'th tros." [ O dear Lord who went on to the cross-beam, it is not becoming for me to kiss your head. I would beg you to allow me now to kiss just your foot"] But the Hortolanus is inexorable; and inexorable in Latin: Mulier, noli me tangere. After the Latinity, he repeats its meaning  in Cornish: "A vynynryth na tuche vy nes."

 In "Celtic" languages, the forms of words change in response to grammar and to adjacent letters. One commentator observes pym-woly cryst should  really ... correctly ... be fymp goli. My instinct is that the words were so regularly used as a stand-alone phrase that they assumed this unadjusted form. It is, of course, an allusion to the powerful devotion to the Lord's Wounds; on my study wall I have good photographic representation of the 'Norfolk' Banner of the Five Wounds. Be gracious, Lord, to the souls of those slaughtered in the 1549 Western Rebellion, and in the Northern 'Pilgrimages' during the 'reigns' of Henry and Elizabeth Tudor.

Amma, you will have gathered, is Cornish for kiss. D'you think it might be onomatopoeic? In a day or two, I hope to make some remarks about English kissing habits, which seem to have differed from those of mainland Europe.

"Mulier noli me tangere". I suspect the text presents this in Latin because it was, well, not unfamiliar. Does anyone recall seeing it in the context of late Medieval art?

In the Cornish version of the phrase, the Lord uses the term vynynryth. Why? vynyn is Cornish for Woman, and ryth, judging by the large number of compounds in the Breton Language which contain its parallel (reizh), appears to come from a root rect- or reg- [cf Latin??]. Rule and rectitude seem to be the story; my baby Breton Dictionary gives justice; equite; droit (ensemble des lois); sexe; genre (en grammaire); outillage. English renderings of the Cornish compound offer womankind.

 But why the word Vynynryth? By this point, Mary of James and Mary Salome have disappeared from the 'stage', leaving just the Magdalene alone with the Gardener. However, I have memories of Latin and Greek texts where a commentator, unable to solve a conundrum, has finally left it with the observation that the difficulty is metri causa. Perhaps we need a word with just this number of syllables. (The author has used the word only a few lines above.)

And we need to remember that in premodern societies people use names ... vocatives ... much less frequently than we do; our verbal interactions are soaked in the gross and promiscuous over-use of names. When I was last in hospital, I became much irritated by all those nurses and auxiliaries, who looked about fifteen-and-half years old, and who constantly shouted JOHN!!! !!! at me. Perhaps the Author of the Resurrexio Domini was preserving her name ... Maria ... from dramatic over-use.

My final point. 

Why will the Lord not permit the Magdalene to touch him? 

Perhaps we do not know enough to be sensitively awake to the social nuances of interactions between men and women in late medieval Cornwall. (Or, indeed, in First-century Palestine?) As I have just remarked, our society is deeply marked by incessant and emphatic verbal insincerities. Perhaps the word thogouth gives us a hint; "it is not fitting". And, a line or two later, "na na wra gruyth na fo the les ... [do not behave inappropriately]"

Some readers may be glad that, for the time being, this blog is done with the Medieval Cornish 'Ordinalia' texts.

The Ordinalia again (5) in Glass?

So, down in Cornwall, during the Middle Ages, they had religious plays, the Ordinalia, in the ancient Cornish language (some enthusiasts are currently trying to revive it; in fact, these dramas in Medieval Cornish have been the main basis of their 'revived' language ... oddly; suppose we spoke an English constructed upon the verses of Chaucer, without paying any attention to the fact that our Geoffrey had both chosen and arranged his words so as to fit his half-millennium-old-metrical scheme! And, Homer's Greek can never have been spoken as a vernacular by anyone.)

However, in the Resurrexio Domini [sic], the Lord (of course) appears first to his Immaculate Mother. 

Medieval Cornish, like Modern English, was an omnivorous language heavy with vocabulary, quotations, phrases, technicalities, expletives from other languages ... English; Latin borrowings going back to the Roman Occupation; contemporary Latin borrowings; French (another thing which the inventors of 'Modern Cornish' can't stand; rather as Herr Hitler did for the German language, their dictionaries constantly enjoin us not to use loan-words amply attested in the literature, but to stick to pure 'Celtic' roots).

And the Lord greets his Mother with the Latin phrase O salve Sancta Parens. This, of course, is the beginning of the Introit for Eastertide Masses of our Lady (and comes ultimately from Sedulius). The O needs to be in the Cornish text because the lines have to have seven syllables.

Throughout the manuscript, there are two scribal hands. Manus prima, is the slightly faded original. Rather darker, manus secunda adds some stage directions, changes some ts to ds, and, at one point, appears to have updated a joke by erasing three lines and writing some different Cornish placenames into the space thus made available ... making it, I suspect, topical to a different audience from that for which the manus prima had originally written out the play.

In the greeting O salve Sancta parens, it looks as if that erasing knife has again been at work underneath the first two words. Over that rasura, O salve is darkly inked in by manus secunda. Most probably, manus prima wrote Salve Sancta parens; manus secunda realised that a syllable extra was needed - made a botched job of supplying it - then scraped the area clean so as to make a neat fresh start.

You can look for yourselves at the manuscript without even travelling up to Oxford: search for Bodley 791 and scroll down to folio 61 verso.

But if you prefer glass pictures to written drama, go to Fairford Church in Gloucestershire. There you will see the Lord greeting His Mother Salve Sancta Parens. This window (Window 7; in two lights) is roughly contemporaneous with the Cornish text: "... probably due to Richard Fox, bishop of Durham and then of Winchester. The glass was made between 1500 and 1517 probably under the direction of the King's glazier, Barnard Flower, largely in his workshops at Westminster." Our Lady has her hands raised in amazement; the literature describes her as "coming from her bedroom in great joy".

At the highest cultural levels of early Tudor England, people were not ashamed of these "extra-textual" stories.

Folk Catholicism tangled with liturgical echoes? (4)

 After the Lord has greeted his Mother with the liturgical formula O Salve Sancta Parens, and has assured her that after her death, she will be assumed to heaven above the angels and saints, Mary expresses a desire to see him (has she hitherto been merely audible?); she genuflectit... presumably, now seeing him. He reassures her (using the same term, melder, 'honey' with which she has earlier addressed him). According to the Stage Directions, she embraces and kisses Him.

I feel that this text has merest dash, in what follows, of maternal, peasant tut-tuttery. As any mother would, Mary desires reassurance that, after all he has been through, her Son is really trouble free. 

Us whet the'th corf galarow/ na torment orth the greffye?/ yw saw ol the wolyow/ a wylys vy the squerdye,/ a wruk an gu ha'n kentrow/ the kyc precius dafole?/ lavar thy'mmo, caradow,/ lemmyn gorthyp fatel fue./

[Are there still pains in your body and torment grieving you? Are all your wounds healed which I saw tear you, which the spear and the nails made to defile your precious flesh? Tell me, my beloved, answer now; how it was.]

Middle Cornish, like modern English was a remarkably resilient and greedy picker-up of words from other languages, from Latin onwards through every possible influencing source! In the above, I have marked in dark blue all the words which, according to the George dictionary, are loan words. How words and meaning do seem to wander ... slither ... around ... Kentrow, for example, apparently from the Latin centrum! Just as we, nowadays, never have a Problem; but 'Issues' are never far away!

The next rubric betrays that the Lord kneels. Are they both now kneeling? Or, more probably, does the text mean that each performs an act of genflecting?  

However that may be, in the next stanza the Lord says reverons thy'so, vam ker; henor mur ha lowene; [reverence to you, dear Mother, much honour and joy ...] to which our Lady replies confortys yv ow colon [my heart is comforted]. 

They both then 'osculantur et separent'.

The Disappearing 'Angels' (3)

 In my last section, I advanced a supposition that the Christus Resurgens would have been sung by members of a group who were attached permanently to a church, and who would, thus, have by custom sung it annually at the Easter Morning Service. There is another point in this dramatic presentation of the Easter Mystery where a similar assumption is made: the Gloria in excelsis Deo is to be sung ... and, again, by the 'Angeli'. 

Surely, these were the functionaries referred to in the rubrics of the first Book of Common Prayer in 1549 as 'the Clerks'. 

Liturgical historians, commonly, have not paid much attention to this group and its place in the woshipping life of a community. Interest has tended to focus upon the texts and their theological meaning. Yet there is a profound change in the spirit and presentation of the Liturgy between 1549 and the date of the second Prayer Book in 1552 ... whatever the texts may have meant or implied.

I have counted eleven references to 'the Clerks' in the 1549 texts and rubrics. But in 1552, not one reference survived. The 'clerks' are no more.

In 1549, 'the clerks' began the Service: "Then shall the Clerkes syng in English for the office, or Introite". The Kyries may be sung by them; next "Then the Prieste standing at Goddes borde shall begin, Glory be to God on high. The Clerkes. And in yearth peace "etc..

The Creed begins similarly. "After the Gospell ended, the Priest shall begin, I beleue in one God. The clerkes shall sing the rest."

At the point of the Offertory, we read "where there be Clerkes ... whyles the Clerkes do syng the Offertory ..." ... ...

Holy , holy ... This the Clerkes shall also syng ... ...

The peace of te Lorde be alwaye with you. The Clerkes. And with thy spirite. ... ...

In tthe Communion tyme the Clarkes shall syng, ii. O lambe of god ... ... ...

... when the Communion is ended, then shallthe Clarkes syng the post Communion ... ...

Where there are no clerkes, there the Priest shall say al things  ... ...

In fact, in 1549, there was very little for the people to say or sing. This may be less evident in a printed text than it must have been to the almost totally quiescent laity. When the Cornish parishioners rose in rebellion in 1549, they remarked in their 'Articles' that many of then knew no English. But even those who did know English will have noticed one thing: while many of the manners of the old 'Masse' had survived into the 1549 Prayer Books which they had heaped onto the bonfires outside Exeter, the newer Book presented them with a root-and-branch change in what they were accustomed to.The Clerks, presumably, will have noticed being obliged to learn new texts. 

We do not know when the dramatic performances of the Ordinalia, including the Resurrexio Domini, ceased to be acted in parochial Playing Places throughout Cornwall. But the culture of the older rites seems to have disappeared fairly rapidly.

And this, I suspect, was the time when the 'Angeli', the Clerkes, who could be called upon to sing the Easter Chant of Christus resurgens and the Sunday-by-Sunday sung parts of the Mass, disappear from the scene, jst as the Abbeys and the Chantries had done.

Perhaps this event, and the massacres which accompanied it, should be marked as the real end of medieval England.

Christus Resurgens ... (2)

Now let us move out of the church building. Near the church, there will probably be a Plen-a-gwary; a circular open-air theatre (in St Just in Penwith it is still there, a literal stone's throw from the church). In these enclosures, religious plays were presented the texts of several of which have survived, written in the Cornish Language with the rubrics ...  stage directions ... naturally in Latin. There were pavilions around the circumference, used by certain of the Players ... we even have diagrams of Who goes Where! As for the audience, I suppose they might have sat around the circumference: but I have wondered if, perhaps, they might just have wandered around the enclosure following the Players.

These plays are called the Ordinalia; one of them is headed

HIC INCIPIT ORDINALE DE RESURREXIONE DOMINI NOSTRI JHESU CHRISTI

We dip into its text about 400 lines after its beginning. We find the Four Soldiers boasting about how well they will guard their buried prisoner; if he tries to get out of the tomb, he will get a 'clout', because Middle Cornish is not afraid of loan-words from English. y pen crac me torse! Violence and threats and rough humour seem to be at the heart of Middle Cornish society. Bribery seems also to function heathily: Pilatus promises the soldiers that, if their custody is successful, gobar da why agas byth Gon Dansotha ha Cruk Heyth ... where the place names of these promised rewards are ... Cornish!

You don't need me to tell you that, despite all their tough talking, the Quattuor Milites, having gone off to their duties, do fall asleep. As the stage instructions put it, Et tunc ibunt ad sepulchrum ... hic dormiunt milites ... tunc surrexit Ihesus a mortuis et iet ubicunque voluerit et cantant angeli cristus resurgens ...

Yes; the medievals did remodel the Latin verb ire to suit their own purposes!

I don't know how the Resurrection was 'presented' dramatically ... whence the actor playing Christ emerged ... Could there have been an aperture in the ground?

But did you notice what was going on as He rose again?

The 'Angels' were singing Christus resurgens.

The list of Characters, which in this play comprises only two angels, could include as many as nine. It is a fair inference that all or some of these sang the Christus Resurgens at the Easter Morning rites. They would be the obvious professionals to 'do' the Antiphon again at this dramatic performance, as an umistakable musical indication that the Lord had indeed risen. 

I think I detect a culture here of assumptions that would have spoken vividly to Medieval Man, but which are almost invisible, intangible, to us. Such assumptions are perhaps the hardest things to uncover and to recognise when one culture looks at a different system.

 

QUATENUS

 I have noticed a grammatical construction which I can thus describe: you have an ut-clause; and dependant upon that clause you have another subordinate clause which might reasonably begin with another ut. In these circumstances, the second potential ut may be replaced by quatenus.

Here is a Patristic example, taking us back a few centuries, from the sermon of S Gregory the Great, read on Easter Sunday: "sic quippe necesse est ut audiamus quae facta sunt, quatenus cogitemus etiam quae nobis sunt ... facienda."

Here is a liturgical example: "Deprecantes, ut beatus confessor Birinus ... nobis obtineat, quatenus ipsius societate perfruamur ..."

And here is a curial example: " ... rogamus, ut ita in dei opere perseverare studeas, quatinus regi regum deo placere valeas ..."

My second example was from a 12th century liturgical book probable connected with Abendon; my third from a letter sent by or associated with Pope S Leo IX, to King Edward the Confessor.

Now here are my queries.

 Is this particular construction widespread? Should we consider it "Christian"?

According to Lewis and Short (sub voce E and F), we should think of Lactantius (d. 326), Cassiodorus (d. 575), and the Digest, which would be heavy enough hints even if we were not advised "(eccl. Lat.)" and "(post-class)." Here we are certainly being referred to temp S Gregory.

But what about the other end of things? I am referring to Renaissance Latin. Is this a usage stylists such as Cardinal Pole, or Bembo or Gigli, would have been happy with? Or would they have deemed it a relic of the Dark Ages?

Has anybody spotted it in any non-Christian texts?

EASTER MORNING (1)

So, at what point, would a medieval Englishman feel that his Easter was really starting? 

The ceremonies of Holy Week have left his parish church with the Most Holy Sacrament, together with the Cross, in a recess, probably on the North side of the Sanctuary and called "the Sepulchre". On Easter Morning, very early (ante matutinas) the clergy enter and go straight to the Sepulchre. Having censed it, they take the Sacrament to the High Altar, where it is replaced in the usual place of Reservation. They then return to the Sepulchre.

The clergy, genuflecting, then extract the Cross. The most senior cleric present "with another most excellent person begins in an alta voce this antiphon Christus resurgens, with which antiphon let the procession proceed with the choir singing the whole antiphon with its verse. And then all the bells are to be rung for a classicum ... the antiphon being sung with its verse by the whole choir ..." [I have given the Exeter version of this]. All then "kneel joyfully before the Cross and kiss it in worship ... The crosses and images throughout the church are unveiled now". [Urquhart.]

So, as this antiphon is loudly chanted, and the bells are rung in a jangling peal, and his church sheds its penitential Lenten aspect, the lay worshipper realises that Easter, surely, is under way! Here is the text of the antiphon  (Romans 6: 9).

"Christus resurgens ex mortuis jam non moritur, mors illi ultra non dominabitur. Quod enim vivit, vivit Deo. Alleluia. Alleluia. Versus Dicant nunc Judaei Quomodo milites custodientes sepulchrum perdiderunt regem ad lapidis positionem, quare non servabant Petram iustitiae aut sepultum reddunt, aut resurgentem adorant nobiscum dicentes Quod enim vivit, vivit Deo. Alleluia. Alleluia.

And so firmly was this fixed in the traditional memory that Cranmer preserved parts of it in his 1549 Prayer Book, to be used "in the Morning afore Matins, the people being assembled in the church". ... indeed, damaged fragments are still present in the BCP.

There are wider cultural references here, rarely or never noticed, to which I intend to return tomorrow. 

I have had a brilliant idea ...

... in the interest of good and harmonious 'community relations' ...

... how about the following:. 

Moslems fast; in fact, their customs so resemble what Christians (vide exempli gratia the Tudor Anglican Book of Homilies) used to do, that it has been argued that there is a connection. 

My suggestion: during the days when Ramadan and Lent overlap, all those who self-identify as 'Christian' should join in the fasting customs of Islam.

Makes sense?