Category: Readings

Learning by Heart

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Learning by Heart

When was the last time you learned something off by heart?

It’s something we have to do as children in school, with vocabulary lists, spelling and times tables, but we also absorb rhymes, poems and song lyrics without even working at it, just by familiarity and repetition. No one sits down to memorise nursery rhymes, but they take up residence in our heads; with early prayers, you learn them even before you can read, so it’s all about repetition and rhythm. With small children, you can use body language to help, and this is how you learn Heads, shoulders, knees and toes; and we learn the Sign of the Cross in exactly the same way.

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Lenten music: deafness, hearing and listening

Read Kate’s latest for The Tablet – Lenten Music: deafness, hearing and listening

One of the recurring ways to identify Jesus as the Messiah is the healings he causes to happen as he is going about in Galilee during the brief period of his public life, and we are hearing about some of these in our Lent readings.

They made him both popular with the people and unpopular with the authorities.  As the Gospel writers keep pointing out, these cures are what the prophets promised centuries before: “Then shall the eyes of the blind be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped; then shall the lame man leap as an hart, and the tongue of the dumb shall sing” (Isaiah 35:5) – and if you’re an English singer, that’s the form you remember it in, because Handel set it to music in Messiah, and he used the King James Version. It’s only a piece of recitative, in an oratorio packed with beautiful arias, but it always makes the hair rise on the back of my neck, because it’s so exciting, and the final “So there!” cadence sounds even more of a challenge than usual

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