What is in Kelvin's Head?

  • Clutha Bar – Helicopter Crash

    I’m just about to go to church to take our St Andrew’s Day eucharist. Inevitably, as we pray, all thoughts are going to be with the ongoing incident in the city centre, where a police helicopter crashed onto the roof of the Clutha Bar when it was full last night.

    I’ve yet to hear direct stories from individuals but know that this weekend I will be talking to those for whom this was a first hand incident. Members of the congregation live close by, others will have been in the area (I was in a nearby pub just the day before) and others have been involved in trying to help the injured – at least one medic from the congregation was called into hospital for what must have been a long night.

    I invite anyone who can pause, to pray with us at 9.30 this morning either in person at the cathedral or wherever you happen to be.

    Our prayers this St Andrew’s Day will be with them all. Praying for the injured and missing. Giving thanks for acts of selfless courage which keep getting reported on the radio. Remembering the people from the emergency services who appeared very quickly and thinking of the many local Glaswegians who walked into danger to help the casualties.

    Eternal God
    For those who wait for news.
    For those who wake with fear.
    Lord in your mercy.
    Hear our prayer.

    Prayers will be offered for those caught up in the incident at all services in St Mary’s this weekend.

    , ,

14 responses to “Liturgical sadness”

  1. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    Has anyone else been following the series in ‘The Tablet’ taking the Latin Sunday Collects from the Roman Missal (Ordinary Form), printing alongside them the official English translations and then commenting on the Collects?

    The effect the series has on me is not what was intended. I spend much of my time being puzzled and irritated by the looseness of the translations from the Latin – words and phrases left out, new ideas included, and sometimes translations which are at best a paraphrase.

    The point of mentioning this is that what I’ve seen of the new English translation of the Roman Mass is undoubtedly more faithful to the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form.

    This will be important to some and, I expect, an irrelevance to others. However, an ecumenical gesture we could make (pause for breathtakingly unpopular suggestion!) would be to incorporate the new relevant parts of the new translation in our own Liturgy. That really *would* show ecumenical goodwill.

    Reply
  2. David |Dah • veed| Avatar
    David |Dah • veed|

    “…the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form.”

    That is certainly debatable. I fail to see that the purpose of the liturgical reforms of the 70s and 80s which resulted in many new liturgical books for most major denominations and prayer books for Anglicans, was to get us all back to the Latin Mass.

    Rome has pretty much cut the rest of us “free” so to speak, as irredeemable for all the heresies of women’s ordination and now GLBT ordinations and same sex blessings, and I am fine with that. I would not go anywhere near the Tiber, but I share Kelvin’s sense of loss of something we pew sitters shared around the world.

    Reply
  3. Robin Avatar
    Robin

    Just to clarify, when I wrote “…the Latin, which is, after all, the definitive form” I meant that it was the definitive form for Roman Catholics.

    Reply
  4. Ritualist Robert Avatar
    Ritualist Robert

    Vicky wrote: “… it is unlikely new conversion areas such as China would find Latin accessible.”

    A Roman friend of mine who probably would know said to me the other day that the Catholics in China use the Latin mass because they missed out on the reforms of Vatican II. Does anybody know if this is true?

    I went recently to a Latin mass here in Sydney with the same friend and most of the servers and the priest were from Vietnam … and a good deal of the back-to-the-future seminarians one sees at the papist cathedral seem to be Korean … so I am not sure that the formality of the Latin mass, or a more formal English one will put off Asian converts.

    It’s a pity that the ecumenical implications of this translation exercise haven’t been pondered a bit more.

    Reply

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