Back to the Future

It's very inconvenient having 27th December as the feast day of your patron saint, so we have shifted our Patronal Festival to the Sunday closest to the feast of St John before the Latin Gate, which is much more user-friendly. I thought we might have Solemn Evensong & Benediction to mark the occasion. There is only one hymn I can find in honour of St John, which is 'Word Supreme Before Creation', a slightly weird piece by Blessed John Keble, so I wrote another one, 'John, Belov'd disciple, pray' to the medieval tune 'L'Homme Armée'. It took a lot of fiddling around with the rhyming scheme, I can tell you. A choir was assembled and began rehearsing. As always as the time drew nearer my feet got colder and colder.

I shouldn't have worried. The choir were superb, and our head server wielded the thurible with applomb having not done it for heaven-knows-how-long. Col the other server had never handled a set of Orthodox hand-bells, not surprising as nobody from Swanvale Halt church has, I think, but did that splendidly too. We had fifty or so people, half of whom were virtually in tears by the end - 'not been to a service like that for 30/40/50 years' was the most common category of comment. I said goodbye to everyone, took off my cassock and scooted off to Tanz Macabre.

It's strange how this, once upon a time the great evangelistic event in the Anglo-Catholic movement, has fallen out of the repertoire almost completely. I've always found Benediction, whether small, quiet and devotional or grand and impressive, profoundly moving and I can't be the only one. I also wonder whether we neglect the forms of devotion preferred by older people at our peril; they are the ones who generate the devotion of the young, it doesn't come out of nowhere. 'Same again next month?' asked one of the congregaton. I doubt it, but it deserves to be part of the mix.