3K posting, etc.

I just passed the 3000th post I've made here since December 2006. A festival, as B has opined, of "wisdom sayings and magical anecdotes." Or less ironically, "naked men and angry Muslims."



Reading some of the liturgy war blogs, I was thinking of one of the things I disliked about the New Regime in Catholic worship since the 60s --most of which I was happy with-- and that was all the options. Especially if they were coded by alphabet. Year B, acclamation C. Too many choices and too much bloviating. As if variety were somehow an absolute good. Reminded me of one of the complaints listed in the elegant explanatory preface to the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, justifying that relatively simple and straightforward set of rites as a replacement for the complex medieval ones:

...the manifold changings of the Service was the cause...that many times there was more business to find out what should be read, than to read it when it was found out.

The opening lines of the preface, again in elegant but straightforward Elizabethan style:

There was never any thing by the wit of man so well devised or so sure established which, in continuance of time, hath not been corrupted.

Those guys could write.


An interesting history of the upcoming Hallowe'en, as a rich layering of Celtic, Roman and Christian festivals, from a shockingly Eurocentric point of view:

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