Music for Mass blog

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Light in the darkness: hymns for Ordinary Time.

We are roughly in the middle of the first section of Ordinary Time in the Church’s year at the moment, the first of the two sequences of Sundays that can be expanded or contracted to make sure that the big dates fall at the right time.

The readings in them can be sequential from Sunday to Sunday; the Gospel usually is, but the First and Second readings can dodge around a bit, and the Responsorial Psalm is a reaction to the First Reading, so that too can come from anywhere (including the odd canticle). This first batch of Ordinary Time, after Christmas, before Lent, is much shorter than the second one (after Pentecost, before Advent), and this year it has only five Sundays, with an early Easter; but because the First Sunday of Ordinary Time is always overtaken by the Baptism of the Lord, the count starts at two. And it’s Year A, so the Gospels are mostly Matthew.

Choosing hymns for these Sundays is an interesting job.

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Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – When water is everywhere – but there really is not a drop to drink.

In the run-up to Christmas, like regrettably many people even in the UK, we had problems with our water supply. We didn’t have the appalling floods that several towns have had, with rivers bursting their banks and heading up the high street. That must be so much worse, with all the cleaning up to be done after. Our water supply just stopped, and we simply had no water coming out of any tap, for days on end.

And there was no warning. We’ve lived in countries where the water supply is regularly interrupted, and we can cope with that; you always fill the kettle before you go to bed, and if you expect a longer shut-off, you also fill the bath, to use for flushing loos and washing. It’s just one of those things about living in some exotic places. But this time and here at home, there was no information to warn us that the water supply was about to stop. When we went to bed, everything was normal; when we got up, the taps didn’t work.

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