Pro Ceciliae

The feast day of my patron saint is approaching fast, but this period of November furnishes the festivals of a number of others. There is Edmund on the 20th, brave King of East Anglia who ended pincushioned with arrows by the wicked Danes, and gentle Pope Clement on the 23rd, drowned late in the 1st century with an anchor dragging him to the bottom of the Black Sea. And then, yesterday, the 22nd marks the entry into eternity of blessed St Cecilia.

Like Catherine of the Wheel, Cecilia was usually listed as one of the medieval Fourteen Holy Helpers, and appears luminously in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century rood screens in Norfolk. Like Catherine, too, and several other members of the Fourteen - Barbara, George, Christopher, and Margaret of Antioch - notwithstanding her popularity, her cult was suppressed by the Vatican in 1969 and she was expunged from the calendar, at the peak of the Roman Church's embarrassment at the credulous and picturesque pieties of its past. 

This was a shame, not just because it meant losing a branch off the great tree of the Church's devotional heritage but because Cecilia was very useful. In the 16th century she'd become the patron saint of musicians, mainly because of the line from her Acts which became part of the liturgy for her feast day: 'as the organs at her wedding feast were playing, Cecilia sang in her heart to the Lord, saying: May my heart remain unsullied, so that I be not confounded'. Musicians need a saint to pray for them, no matter what her history may or may not have been. Chris, our late organist at Lamford, when the new edition of the Guildford Diocesan Directory arrived in the church office, would never fail to flick through it and fulminate that organists and directors of music weren't included alongside all the pastoral assistants and youth workers and the like. Since then I've always prayed for our church musicians. 

Cecilia is still there in the Anglican calendar, but only as a minor observance, which means she doesn't get a collect of her own. If you observe her feast day you have to use the Common of Martyrs and stick her name in it, which strikes me as a bit stingy. There are collects for Cecilia online, but they seem to have been written by people who don't know the strict haiku-like conventions that govern the structure of collects. So here is mine, compiled from 'other sources'.

Gracious God,
whose blessed martyr Cecilia sang in her heart
to strengthen her witness to you:
grant that we may join with her in Creation's canticle of praise until the last,
and share in the song of those redeemed
by our Saviour Jesus Christ,
who with you and the Holy Spirit lives and reigns,
one God, in glory everlasting. Amen.