Smokey Tom and the Virgin Mary

The trouble with not blogging regularly is that so many things happen it is hard to decide what to write about. Not only that, but the details get fuzzy.

So here is start on some things that have been going on:

Last Saturday morning, I attended a service at St. Thomas’s Church in Toronto to honour the Virgin Mary.   Her month is the merry month of May apparently.  In a brief homily, Fr. Jonathan Eayrs described how May, not April,  is really springtime here in southern Ontario (although today felt more like summer – more on that later).  

Creation rises anew. Mary provides (a symbol of) the connection between the divine and the material world.  Unfortunately, I forget what else he said, but it related to these lines of this hymn addressing Mary:

One in joyful songs of praise,

Let us pass from mournful days

To the Paschal mystery:
God arose who lived in thee!
Virgo Maria
…
Mother, let thy risen King

Rise in us a living spring

Virgo Maria
(French mediaeval melody harmonized by R. V. Williams)

I like  the pun on spring and the line, "God arose who lived in thee." Creation is not fallen by its very nature but, alas, only becomes so by what we do to it.

Also on a further tangent, I like to think that every baby is an incarnation of divine purpose, not only Jesus.  And I admire both Mary and Joseph’s courage in rejecting social pressure to feel guilty (the former) or to punish (the latter). 

But what I enjoyed most about this service was the procession to the Lady Chapel (Smokey Tom’s is Anglo-Catholic and considered nosebleed high by most other Anglicans around here). Why a  ladder was leaning against the wall beside a statue of the Virgin Mary puzzled me until it became apparent that a small boy, dressed in a red cassock and white surplice, was going to climb it to put a wreathe of flowers on the Virgin’s head:

 He made his way ever higher up the ladder but kept treading on his vestments and stopping to get unstuck. Finally she was crowned. It was delightful. That’s the way I like my liturgy.

And that was Saturday morning.