Fanfare for Allhallowstide

An adaptation by Diocesan Design of the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece (probably by Fra Angelico) 

In England and Wales All Saints' Day is being kept on November 2nd this year.  Happy feast-day!

     How shall we pilgrims keep the law of love?
  How shall we follow where our Lord has led?
  The saints know how: they point the way ahead;
  They watch the road to Heaven from above.

  The saints were young and old, were great and small,
  In myriad lives showed one thing to be true:
  Whatever works of woe the world may do,
  The Lord shall never let His faithful fall.

  So we on earth, we should be saints as well,
  We wayward wayfarers whom they invite
  To blaze with love, to set the world alight,
  To join them in the joy in which they dwell.

  As we must one day die, they also died,
  But live now as we hope we too shall live.
  To all our friends in Heaven let us give
  Our joyful greetings at Allhallowstide!

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

‘Here is my stone-ribbed nest…’  St. David’s Cathedral, 6th March 2024.

Wishing a very happy feast of St. David to all who have reason to celebrate!

[…]  I am David.

I am the Dovebearer.

I speak of peace.

I counsel joy.

    In a fold of the furthest west,

    Here is my stone-ribbed nest.

I am David.  

Under my feet

The rock of Dyfed

Has raised me up

    To tower in time’s March gales.

    I am David.  I am Wales.

Raymond Garlick (1926–2011)

Fanfare for Allhallowstide

An adaptation by Diocesan Design of the Fiesole San Domenico Altarpiece (probably by Fra Angelico) 

Reposted as tradition by now dictates:

     How shall we pilgrims keep the law of love?
  How shall we follow where our Lord has led?
  The saints know how: they point the way ahead;
  They watch the road to Heaven from above.

  The saints were young and old, were great and small;
  However they were called, one truth they knew:
  Whatever works of woe the world may do,
  The Lord shall never let His faithful fall.

  So we on earth, we should be saints as well,
  We wayward wayfarers whom they invite
  To blaze with love; to set the world alight;
  To join them in the joy in which they dwell.

  As we must one day die, they also died,
  But live now as we hope we too shall live.
  To all our friends in Heaven let us give
  Our joyful greetings at Allhallowstide!

Happy St. George’s Day!

May St. George and indeed St. Edmund and Our Lady of Walsingham save and protect England, this small precious portion of the Earth’s surface: much misunderstood, much maligned, much afflicted in various ways, but still the home of many people of good will, and still to be honoured, cherished and defended.

The Fantasy in E Major by Harold Darke (1888–1976) in an arrangement for strings by C. Jenkins, accompanied by a sequence of paintings by James Lynch (b. 1956) mainly of scenes in Wiltshire, Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.  Many thanks to YouTube user David Harris for putting the two together. 

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Happy St. David’s day to all who love Wales!

The Black Mountains from near Llanbedr, Monmouthshire.  Easter Sunday, 2019.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Cefn Llan, Aberystwyth, 15th October 2015.

To all who live in Wales and love Wales, Happy St. David’s Day!

‘Inspiration from the Saints’ by Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh: review

Because on the Internet one can never be sure what most people will come out with next, there are only a few blogs that I trust enough to recommend to others.  One of them is the Irish Papist blog (www.irishpapist.blogspot.com), a miscellany of essays, spiritual reflections, invigorating yet always charitable polemic, occasional fiction and even poetry (rhyming! metrical!).  A few month ago its author, Maolsheachlann Ó Ceallaigh, brought out his first published book, published by the Angelico Press and entitled ‘Inspiration from the Saints’.  St Paul’s bookshop next to Westminster Cathedral were able to get it for me very quickly, but I have only just got round to reviewing it.  It is written in the same conversational, fireside style as the blog and there is certainly inspiration to be had from it — inspiration that is both reassuring and disconcerting. 

It is reassuring because it shows, with its arrangement into chapters named according to human experiences (‘Childhood’, ‘Sinners’, ‘Prayer’, ‘Mirth’), how similar the saints are to the rest of us.  The saints had all these experiences too. There is as much variety among them as among ordinary sinners, not only in their age, origin or the era in which they lived, but in their temperament and character, in the suffering they saw around them or faced themselves. They were and are not identikit mannequins sent to taunt us with their sanctity, but our living and breathing brothers and sisters, who have differed from us merely by having answered God’s call to greatness in its fullness.

What is disconcerting is the gradual realisation that if the saints are just like us, there is no reason why we, too, could not be saints. The book — always in the same companionable way — jolts the reader into a new awareness of the plausibility of sainthood for us all.  Saints are what we are meant to be, and would be, if only we co-operated with God. Our origin or station in life does not matter: we might be rich or poor, married or unmarried, lay or ordained, outgoing or withdrawn, young or old, bookish or practical-minded. So too are the company of saints.

A lot of work has gone into this book, both into the research and the crafting, but it wears that craftsmanship lightly. A thoroughly recommended read, the first I hope of many appearances of Ó Ceallaigh’s work between its own two covers. 

Happy Feast of All Saints!

As we must one day die they also died,
But live now as we hope we too shall live:
O keep in prayer all souls; O gladly give
Your saints your greeting at Allhallowstide!

(D. Newman, Feast of All Saints, 1 November 2017)

St George’s Day

I hope nobody will mind, in honour of St. George, patron of England, my use of this picture of Rudgwick in Sussex to represent all of England:

At Rudgwick, W. Sussex (Easter Sunday, 2015)

Also, remembering the words of G. K. Chesterton, who is always right, here is a picture of an English post-box, an English telegraph-pole, an English traffic-cone and an English bicycle in an English fog:

“No one can be good critic of England who does not understand fogs. And no one can be a really patriotic Englishman who does not like fogs.”  Burnt Fen, Suffolk. (Probably).

By the way, there has been a St. George’s day treat for those of us who hold that fine creed that railways are England’s greatest gift to the world (G. K. Chesterton possibly excepted) and also that nobody really minds when they are turned into a big toy.  Four generations of locomotives (one the Flying Scotsman), each in their day the last word in speed on the Great Northern / East Coast main line from London to Edinburgh, have run in parallel from Thirsk to York.  The BBC reports here.  It is admittedly at least partially a publicity stunt for the new trains that are shortly being introduced… but it’s a fun publicity stunt!

St David’s Ash Wednesday

Aberystwyth, St. David’s Day, 2016

Happy St David’s Day, even though it is also Ash Wednesday!  Let the people of Wales, and all who love Wales, turn to their patron in song.  Song is what the Welsh are best at: after all, there is no distinction in Welsh between poetry and music; there is only cerdd.  If Ireland is the land of saints and scholars, Wales is the home of monks and musicians.

May the Welsh people, who know better than most that anything that is not firm rock is deep water, never cease to mark St. David’s Day.

Dewi Sant, gweddia drosom ni!

Parêd Gŵyl Dewi Sant, Aberystwyth, 5 Mawrth 2016

A Patroness for Archivists

Most occupations — the transport industry, the financial sector, the medical profession, the emergency services — involve trying to overcome the shortness of time.   But others also have to cope with time’s sheer magnitude: for history has shown us that there is rather a lot of it!  The archival profession numbers among these.  If some records are made to be kept, and if they are to outlive our era and last long into many others, then we must ready our records, and their context, to survive decades and centuries.  And information is such a fragile thing.

This has been the week of the annual Explore Your Archive campaign, which promotes archives and their holdings to the public.  Hopefully it is not a mere coincidence that it fell around the feast day (Friday 25th November) of St Catherine of Alexandria, patroness of archivists (among others), and the ranks of whose petitioners I have joined this year.  St Catherine, pleading the cause of all archivists as they wrestle with the past, for the sake of the future, in the narrow window of the present, ora pro nobis!  And deliver us from ninety-year-old sellotape.

St Catherine of Alexandria, Ventura Salimbeni (1567-1613).  From the Wikimedia Commons.