The Church is clad in her Passiontide purple, statues and images veiled and the Altar of sacrifice, the meeting place between Heaven and Earth, is covered in penitential cloths, the better to mark this solemn season. The final Asperges of Lent come tomorrow, next week we will assemble down the road for the singing of the Palm Sunday Gospel and the procession of palms before coming into the Church for High Mass. This is a time when parochial matters, the cash flow of the Church, fund raising, new vestments and all that peripheral stuff ceases. We enter into a period of introspection and visible penitence, waiting for the passion and death - and of course, joyful resurrection - of Our Lord.
The High Altar in close up reveals something of the grand austerity of the Passiontide veiling, which attracts the light flooding into the sanctuary and soaks it up, reflecting nothing and adding a barren look to the area which is quite in keeping with the season. It would be nice to have six wooden candlesticks as well, to replace the golden ones with, but as I said, this is not the time for looking.
Continuing yesterday's post regarding the chasuble made from a wedding dress, here it is. It may be from the estate of Miss Milne, of the Kendal Milne family (famous department store owners) who lived around the corner and paid for the new roof in the nineteen seventies. Nobody seems sure, though. The fashion for leaving wedding dresses to the Church is an old one and we have a number of bits and pieces made from fabric which we have been given, from a number of unusual sources. More on this after Lent!
The Church is clad in her Passiontide purple, statues and images veiled and the Altar of sacrifice, the meeting place between Heaven and Earth, is covered in penitential cloths, the better to mark this solemn season. The final Asperges of Lent come tomorrow, next week we will assemble down the road for the singing of the Palm Sunday Gospel and the procession of palms before coming into the Church for High Mass. This is a time when parochial matters, the cash flow of the Church, fund raising, new vestments and all that peripheral stuff ceases. We enter into a period of introspection and visible penitence, waiting for the passion and death - and of course, joyful resurrection - of Our Lord.
The High Altar in close up reveals something of the grand austerity of the Passiontide veiling, which attracts the light flooding into the sanctuary and soaks it up, reflecting nothing and adding a barren look to the area which is quite in keeping with the season. It would be nice to have six wooden candlesticks as well, to replace the golden ones with, but as I said, this is not the time for looking.
Continuing yesterday's post regarding the chasuble made from a wedding dress, here it is. It may be from the estate of Miss Milne, of the Kendal Milne family (famous department store owners) who lived around the corner and paid for the new roof in the nineteen seventies. Nobody seems sure, though. The fashion for leaving wedding dresses to the Church is an old one and we have a number of bits and pieces made from fabric which we have been given, from a number of unusual sources. More on this after Lent!
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