What is in Kelvin's Head?

A Preface for Ash Wednesday

13/02/2021

The following preface was written to mark the beginning of Lent and reflects the language and character of the Lenten material in the Scottish Liturgy 1982 and Daily Prayer of the Scottish Episcopal Church

Dear Friends in Christ, it is the custom of Christian people to prepare to mark the time of Christ’s passion and resurrection by a season of penitence and fasting.

The church calls each of us during these forty days to repent of all that causes harm to ourselves, harm to our earthly dwelling place and harm to our relationship with God.

By carefully keeping these days, Christians take to heart the call to repentance and the assurance of forgiveness proclaimed in the gospel, and so grow in faith and devotion. In turning our hearts towards God, we discover anew the boundless grace of God.

For God will help us to create beauty even within the turmoil of this chaotic world and will help us to gather a harvest of joy and gladness from lives of sorrow and care. Today and every day, God calls the wandering exile home.

We are invited therefore, in the name of the Church, to the observance of a holy Lent, by self-examination and repentance; by prayer, fasting, and self-denial; and by reading and meditating on God’s holy word.

8 responses to “I seem to have been spared”

Erp

06/12/2008

Glad to hear you are feeling better. May you have a good illness free Advent for you and your congregation. (Is blue or purple the Advent colour at St. Mary’s?)

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kelvin

06/12/2008

The colour is purple, though sadly we don’t have a full high mass set for this time of the year.

In my former congregation, we kept what people called “sarum colours” – blue in advent, unbleached linen in Lent.

I believe the term sarum colours to be historically incorrect, but I rather liked the distinction between the two seasons.

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Marion Conn

06/12/2008

Hi Kelvin, glad to hear you are feeling better. In respect to “sarum colours” may i suggest this website, http://anglicanhistory.org/essays/wright/sarum.pdf

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Erp

07/12/2008

Thanks for the distinction. One of the local churches (non-denominational university with one episcopal priest out of three ministers) here uses blue but I seem to have recalled purple from other places. I’m not sure where they got the blue candles though, they are a very odd shade.

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Ritualist Robert

07/12/2008

Speaking of Sarum, were there medieval uses peculiar to Scotland, Fr Kelvin? Presumably there may have been something like a St Andrews Use.

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ryan

07/12/2008

Yeah, I think the Sarum rite sounds fabulous, but Advent candles should obviously be purple and pink :-).

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kelvin

07/12/2008

I presume that there was a St Andrews Use, though I’m no medievalist and there may be people better qualified to comment about it than I am.

There certainly seems to have been a very spectacular Use at the collegiate church of St Mary and St Anne in Glasgow. There is some speculation that St Mary’s (with its side chapel dedicated to St Anne) might have some significant roots in that congregation, which met in a church where the Tron theatre now is.

The ceremonies (and endowments) of this church were lavish. There is a little about it on wikipedia.

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Fr Dougal

08/12/2008

Use of Aberdeen is very well recorded in FC Eels book on King’s College Chapel, rather like Sarum and Bangor.

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