Veni Creator Spiritus

It's a shame that Pentecost Day, the Birthday of the Church - or, as I think of it, its baptism - passes by almost unremarked in the Western Church. There have never been widespread liturgical observances to celebrate the great day of the descent of the Holy Spirit to match the solemnities of Easter. Once upon a time Victorian Dissenting chapels held parades and children's outings on 'Whit Sunday', and the modern Anglican Common Worship makes some attempt to recognise the day with a special (if low-key) rite of 'Commissioning' the congregation to carry on the Church's work, but that's about it.

Looking back some time ago at the old rites of the Easter Vigil (the ritual 'charging-up' of the font by blessing the water, breathing on it, dipping the Paschal Candle in it and pouring in the oils of the Catechumens and of Chrism), I came across references to this also happening on the Vigil of Pentecost. I couldn't find any explanation for this until I asked a well-known liturgical scholar who happens to live in Lamford parish. Originally all baptisms took place at the Easter Vigil, which was the only occasion in the year when the baptismal water would be solemnly blessed, but eventually numbers grew too many and some baptisms were postponed to the Pentecost Vigil; the ritual was repeated that night too. And it froze in that position, rather anomalously.

Swanvale Halt can't exactly match the festivities at the Pantheon in Rome, but I wanted to do something which marked Pentecost as the celebration of the 'charging-up' of the Church as the Body of Christ with the energy of the Holy Spirit. So, after the Creed, we processed down to the font to the accompaniment of a Litany of the Saints, but those saints actually depicted in the church rather than the usual lists, finishing with great holy figures from the parish's past and 'all the holy souls of this parish'. Then I took some of the blessing prayers from the old English Missal rite, judiciously, I hope, cut down as they are pretty long and repetitious, carried out the full ceremony of blessing the baptismal water. We then returned to the front of the church while I read the 'blessing of the light' prayer from Common Worship and we concluded with the Commissioning rite before carrying on with the prayers in the usual pattern.

We blessed the font at the Paschal Vigil too, but not with the full-scale ceremonies, so this marks the completion of my attempt to work out a pattern that restores the Catholic liturgical order and makes coherent sense too: I was very pleased with how it went down. And I wore the new St Catherine red set, but more of that another time!

More spiritually, it was very fitting that at the 8am mass conducted by our curate I seemed to feel the first shiftings of the tectonic plates of my heart about the unpleasant events of seven weeks ago: the first signs of, perhaps, being able to share in somebody else's happiness through my own disappointment. The Mass is where we are all united in one Body, and I stand a chance of sharing joys which strictly don't belong to me at all. Thanks be to God.