At the meeting of the local chapter of the SCP last week the conversation, reprehensibly, turned to vestments and the impracticality of the maniple, the embroidered strip of cloth a priest of a traditionalist bent might wear over their left arm (in origin it was a napkin to wipe things up). The consensus was that people don't use them for fear of knocking over everything on the altar. 'Oh, you get used to it', I said ostentatiously. 'I wore a maniple at Christmas', put in one of my brethren. 'It was made of tinsel'. I decided not to pursue the matter. A bit later I saw another of my colleagues blithely topping up his coffee with sparkling water from a bottle. I don't think it'll catch on. As we stood in the chancel of the church which was hosting us for Mass, my imagination was suddenly taken back a millennium or more to some sparsely-decorated chapel of Anglo-Saxon England where a group of monks or clerics would have been gathered around an altar in exactly the same way doing pretty much the same sort of thing. All those figures would, in their time, have been linked into the eternal worship of Heaven just as we, a group of miscellanously-shaped and -gendered Anglican priests, were in ours. They took part in it, died, and handed their role on to others who took their place - and so on, until there we all were centuries later. The liturgy abides: we who celebrate it come and go. We are part of its story, not it of ours. It's more real than we are. And there's something profoundly comforting about that.
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