Making Assumptions

I see I don't have time to write the complicated blog post I planned, so here instead, to celebrate the day, is a dramatically sidelit photo of the plaque of the Virgin and Child we have in Swanvale Halt church. Made in the early 1900s by Mary Watts, it has a suitably Italianate look to it despite originating in the Home Counties. And of course, Jesus looks about as baby-like as Brian Blessed playing the Emperor Augustus in I Claudius, which is an authentically medieval/Renaissance approach.

It was the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin today, or the Dormition if you're being Orthodox in mood (for Roman Catholics, the bodily assumption of the Virgin into heaven at the end of her life is a dogma you have to believe; for Orthodox believers, it's an opinion you are free to hold or not; for Anglicans, it's a phrase that makes a churchperson either compose their face into a blank look or go into a swoon depending which bit of the Church they belong to). As Bishop Mervyn Stockwood once reportedly told an Anglo-Catholic clergyman in his diocese who remarked on the day in question, 'I'm afraid that's not an Assumption we share'.

I dragged out S.D.'s old Marian vestments for Mass this morning, and at the end we said the Angelus prayer at the statue of the BVM much to the delight of some present and the bemusement of others. They ring the Angelus here as the call to prayer before Mass and probably have done since my predecessor Fr Barlow's day, but I'm not sure how many people know the words (or, indeed, that there are any words to know).