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Pentecost 

Using calendar: England - Arundel & Brighton. You can change this.

Alleluia! The Spirit of the Lord has filled the whole world. Come, let us adore him, alleluia.

Year: C(I). Liturgical Colour: Red.

The fiftieth day

The name “Pentecost” comes from the Greek word meaning “fiftieth.” Like Easter, it is tied to a Jewish feast. 49 days (7 weeks, or “a week of weeks”) after the second day of Passover, the Jews celebrated the Feast of Weeks (Shavuot).
  Passover celebrates the freeing of the Jews from slavery; Shavuot celebrates their becoming God’s holy people by the gift and acceptance of the Law; and the counting of the days to Shavuot symbolises their yearning for the Law.
  From a strictly practical point of view, Shavuot was a very good time for the Holy Spirit to come down and inspire the Apostles to preach to all nations because, being a pilgrimage festival, it was an occasion when Jerusalem was filled with pilgrims from many countries.
  Symbolically, the parallel with the Jews is exact. We are freed from the slavery of death and sin by Easter; with the Apostles, we spend some time as toddlers under the tutelage of the risen Jesus; and when he has left, the Spirit comes down on us and we become a Church.

Other saints: St Simon Stock (c.1212-c.1265)

Southwark
Simon is likely to have been one of the first Carmelites in England in the 1240s. An accurate factual history is difficult to piece together amidst the many stories and legends that arise about him from that time. What the many legends tell us is that he was a memorable and significant figure in the foundations of the Carmelites in England and the Order during a time of great change. Historians would agree that Simon was an Englishman, who spent his early life as a hermit. During this time he is said to have lived in the trunk or ‘stock’ of a tree, thereafter being named Simon Stock. It is also likely that he would have participated in the important chapter of 1247 at Aylesford in Kent, that worked to adapt the lifestyle of the hermits from the Mount Carmel to a more acceptable way of life in medieval Europe. Simon would later serve as the Carmelite Prior General sometime between 1254 to 1265. He died around 1265 whilst visiting monasteries in Bordeaux, France.
  Simon’s devotion to Our Lady of Mount Carmel is captured in the tale of the ‘scapular vision,’ the first written account of which is found recorded about 150 years after his death. The clothing of Simon with the scapular by Mary is best understood in the context of the medieval times of feudal Europe. Simon, as a devotee of Mary (who was known as patroness and protector of Carmelites), was clothed by her as a sign of the exchange of promises of service offered by the Carmelite and Mary’s promise of spiritual protection. Later in the 14th century the Carmelite brown scapular became for many this outward sign of a reciprocal agreement of dedicated service and protection between the wearer and Mary whose protection pointed the way to Christ.

Other saints: Saint Brendan (486 - 578)

Ireland
He was born in Munster, in south-west Ireland, and became a monk and a priest. He founded a number of monasteries and travelled to Wales, to Iona, and on a three-year missionary journey to Britain.
  He is famous for his voyage to the New World, which has become so accreted with traditional and legendary elements that it is impossible to discern what truth there is in it (rather the way that the life of Alexander the Great attracted mythical elements that made him, among other things, the son of the last Pharaoh of Egypt). That there is some truth in the story of the voyage is likely. Ireland at this time was the centre of a high Christian culture at a time when much of Europe had collapsed into chaos and paganism, and Irishmen regularly went on missionary journeys to bring the Gospel to distant lands. It would have been natural to expand this to the far West, where lands might well exist, and where, if they did exist, they were waiting to hear the Gospel. Whether Brendan ever reached the New World may be doubted, and his journey is unlikely to have lasted seven years; but the story is evidence of a tradition of voyaging that involved many more people than Brendan. Certain aspects of Aztec mythology, for example, can be most easily interpreted as a way of preserving teaching of an actual shipwrecked priest by encoding it as myth.
  See the article in Wikipedia.

Other saints: St John Stone (?-1539)

16 May (where celebrated)
John Stone was a Doctor of Theology, living in the Augustinian friary at Canterbury. The place where the Augustinian friary once stood on St George’s Street is still called Whitefriars. During the time of the Reformation Parliament, Stone publicly denounced the behaviour of King Henry VIII from the pulpit of the Austin Friars and stated his approval of the status of monarch’s first marriage — clearly opposing the monarch’s wish to gain a divorce. The Act of Supremacy of 1534 declared the king to be the only supreme head of the Church in England. This was followed by the Treasons Act which enjoined the penalty of high treason on anyone who might maliciously desire to deprive the king of his title of supreme head of the Church. All bishops, priests and religious were required to acknowledge his title. On 14 December 1538 the Bishop of Dover Richard Ingworth visited Canterbury and called on the Augustinian friary with an order to close it down as part of the dissolution of monasteries in England. Every friar was forced to sign a formal document agreeing to the Act of Supremacy; Stone refused to sign. After being held in the Tower of London for some time he was sent back to Canterbury to be tried under the Treasons Act. He was found guilty and sentenced to death. Before his execution at the Dane John (Dungeon Hill), Canterbury he said: “I close my apostolate in my blood. In my death I shall find life, for I die for a holy cause, the defence of the Church of God, infallible and immaculate”. Stone was hanged, drawn and quartered; his head and body were placed on display to dishonour his corpse as a traitor.
DK

About the author of the Second Reading in today's Office of Readings:

Second Reading: St Irenaeus (130 - 202)

Irenaeus was born in Smyrna, in Asia Minor (now Izmir in Turkey) and emigrated to Lyons, in France, where he eventually became the bishop. It is not known for certain whether he was martyred or died a natural death.
  Whenever we take up a Bible we touch Irenaeus’s work, for he played a decisive role in fixing the canon of the New Testament. It is easy for people nowadays to think of Scripture – and the New Testament in particular – as the basis of the Church, but harder to remember that it was the Church itself that had to agree, early on, about what was scriptural and what was not. Before Irenaeus, there was vague general agreement on what scripture was, but a system based on this kind of common consent was too weak. As dissensions and heresies arose, reference to scripture was the obvious way of trying to settle what the truth really was, but in the absence of an agreed canon of scripture it was all too easy to attack one’s opponent’s arguments by saying that his texts were corrupt or unscriptural; and easy, too, to do a little fine-tuning of texts on one’s own behalf. Irenaeus not only established a canon which is almost identical to our present one, but also gave reasoned arguments for each inclusion and exclusion.
  Irenaeus also wrote a major work, Against the Heresies, which in the course of denying what the Christian faith is not, effectively asserts what it is. The majority of this work was lost for many centuries and only rediscovered in a monastery on Mount Athos in 1842. Many passages from it are used in the Office of Readings.

Liturgical colour: red

Red is the colour of fire and of blood. Liturgically, it is used to celebrate the fire of the Holy Spirit (for instance, at Pentecost) and the blood of the martyrs.

Mid-morning reading (Terce)1 Corinthians 12:13 ©
In the one Spirit we were all baptised, Jews as well as Greeks, slaves as well as citizens, and one Spirit was given to us all to drink.

Noon reading (Sext)Titus 3:5,7 ©
God saved us by means of the cleansing water of rebirth and by renewing us with the Holy Spirit which he has so generously poured over us through Jesus Christ our saviour. He did this so that we should be justified by his grace, to become heirs looking forward to inheriting eternal life.

Afternoon reading (None)2 Corinthians 1:21-22 ©
Remember it is God himself who assures us all, and you, of our standing in Christ, and has anointed us, marking us with his seal and giving us the pledge, the Spirit, that we carry in our hearts.

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Scripture readings taken from The Jerusalem Bible, published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. For on-line information about other Random House, Inc. books and authors, see the Internet web site at http://www.randomhouse.com.
 
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