Category: books

Kelvin has written very movingly of the ways the eucharist reforms us. He alluded to Dom Gregory Dix’s wonderful words, and it seemed worth quoting them in full:

Was ever another command so obeyed? For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacle of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for Columbus setting out to discover America; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna; for the repentance of Margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for Captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre; on the beach at Dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc—one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei—the holy common people of God.

Dom Gregory Dix, The Shape of the Liturgy

Yesterday, several of the Piskie bloggers met to tend the SEC stall at Nexus — the somewhat unfortunately named child of The Christian Resources Exhibition and the Clyde Presbytery. It was very much a meeting of the good, the earnest and the lonely, and it was sometimes hard to see why we were there, except that it would have been wrong not to be there. But the lack of crowds left plenty of time for thought.

Across from us was a stall for Banner of Truth publishing. And all around they had large glossy posters advertising their wares. They were for cheery books like Raising Children God’s Way, Temptation: Resisted and Repulsed, and Truth’s Victory Over Error. But the one that fascinated me — and seemed to be carefully angled in the SEC’s direction — was for a book called Her Husband’s Crown.

All day I wondered. At one point when business was slow, I went to chat to the young man who was standing there. But no matter how gently I trod, he was clearly terrified of me, and I could not be so cruel as to bait him about the books. Later, I was the one left alone on the stall, and the older braver man from Banner of Truth came over to talk. Eventually, I summoned courage:

‘Tell me, what is ‘her husband’s crown?’ Continue reading “one for the ladies” →