I don’t know. The beard makes it look like he’s got something to hide, and the bunch of oddballs around him look like members of a cult. One of them is doing a passable impression of Abraham Lincoln and another appears to be Clive Dunn in a flat cap.
How does his death help us?
I suppose if he can be taken out before he enacts the inevitable mass suicide ritual, all of these people’s lives will be saved.
I believe in God the Father Almighty,
Maker of heaven and earth:
And in Jesus Christ his only Son our Lord,
Who was conceived by the Holy Ghost,
Born of the Virgin Mary,
Suffered under Pontius Pilate,
Was crucified, dead, and buried:
He descended into hell;
The third day he rose again from the dead;
He ascended into heaven,
And sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty;
From thence he shall come to judge the quick and the dead.
I believe in the Holy Ghost;
The holy Catholick Church;
The Communion of Saints;
The Forgiveness of sins;
The Resurrection of the body,
And the Life everlasting.
Amen.
This is the Apostles’ Creed as it appears in the 1662 Book of Common Prayer. A beautiful piece of writing, even if you happen not to agree with the sentiments.
A few years ago I was attending evensong at Trinity College, Cambridge, and the time came for saying the Creed. The congregation turned to face the East.
The Creed has natural pauses built into it, most notably before the catalogue beginning ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’. On this occasion, the congregants paused for breath at the appropriate point, but failed to start again. Even the presiding priest stopped talking.
This sudden silence may be interpreted in any of several ways. The probability is that, having stopped and paused, no one person wanted to take the responsibility of starting up again lest he should be a lone voice, a pelican in the wilderness (as the Psalmist says), and so silence enveloped the chapel. At the time, I liked to think that the words about to be said — ‘I believe in the Holy Ghost’ etc. — had struck the entire congregation as so unlikely, so far-fetched, as to be unutterable.
The silence lasted five seconds, possibly slightly longer. It certainly felt longer. To our credit, most of us started to laugh as we launched into the final straight.
It’s a testament to the enduring qualities of the 1662 Creed that it inspires poetry to this day.
Hello. I’m off to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols at King’s College this afternoon, which is always a joyous experience, and then I will be busy doing various Christmassy things, so I will take this opportunity to wish all readers of this blog a Merry Christmas. If you want to listen to the carol service, it’s live on Radio 4 at 3pm, and you can play Spot the Gareth in the televised service on BBC2 later in the afternoon. It was recorded a couple of weeks ago, but if there was ever a facade that it was live then even Stephen Cleobury has given up pretending.
This is a Brahms chorale prelude on ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen’ that will be played before the service today. It’s one of my favourite pieces of Christmas music. I remember when I first heard it – it was on some enchanted evening, possibly across a crowded room. It’s meant for the organ, but you can play it on the piano, though you generally don’t, but in fact I generally do, not being an organist. Anyway, have a good one.
Sad news came this morning of the death of Philip Ledger at the age of 74. He preceded Stephen Cleobury as Director of Music at King’s College, Cambridge, a post he held from 1974 to 1982, and his carols and arrangements are still sung every year both at King’s and much further afield. I went to evensong at King’s this evening, and he was remembered in the service. A Ledger introit was sung by King’s Voices, and I suspect the beautiful final responses may have been his too.
It’s doubly sad to lose both Ledger and his frequent recital partner Robert Tear in the space of barely a year and a half. I have written before, I think, of my love for Tear and Ledger’s recordings of Harold Fraser-Simson’s settings of the hums of Winnie-the-Pooh. Our LP of Three Cheers for Pooh! got worn out in my childhood. Tear and Ledger are a delightful double-act in these songs, warm and witty. The recordings aren’t out on CD at the moment, I think, but you can sample them here, and there is even a link to a zip file of the whole album on that page, not of course that I condone bootlegs. You can more easily get hold of their performances of the songs of e.g. Benjamin Britten and Madeleine Dring, which are really quite as memorable.
