Time, Time, Time

Today is the feast of Saint Thomas the Apostle. Except when it isn’t. The feast days of most saints are the day they died. For Thomas, today is properly the feast commemorating “the Translation of Saint Thomas” – the day on which his relics were translated (moved) from Mylapore in India to Edessa in Mesopotamia in A.D. 232.

Presumably, this is the day they arrived. It would certainly take more than a single day to go from India to Turkey!

So today is the Feast of Thomas… except that it wasn’t always. His main feast was celebrated for centuries on 21 December, the day when tradition has it he was run though by spears, wielded by soldiers of a Greek-descended Indo-Parthian Satrap named Mazdai in western India.

He was apparently upset with Thomas for converting his wife and children. Some things never change.

During the calendar reform of 1970, this ancient feast was suppressed and the other, minor local feast was elevated to Thomas’ big day.

This brings up an issue I’ve been wrestling with in recent days.

As a Benedictine Oblate, I am obligated to pray the Liturgy of the Hours. Mind you, it’s not a heavy burden most days – I find it a great series of centering moments in my day, when I can take some time out for prayer. It is my participation in the sanctification of time, taking to heart Saint Paul’s admonition to “pray without ceasing” (1 Thess 5:17).

This is, of course, the whole point.

For many years, I’ve used the big magillah – the four-volume set. I don’t much care for the clunkiness of some of the translations, though, particularly in the collects.

The typography is irritating, and the organization of most of the volumes is just bizarre. So over the years I have experimented with other versions.

A one-volume version that I tried for a while is Benedictine Daily Prayer: A Short Breviary. I very much enjoyed the way this book was put together in terms of organization and the whole look and feel. The addition of specifically Benedictine saints to the calendar was also very nice.

Unfortunately, the translation was so irritating to me, that after a year I abandoned it.

As part of my preparations for my pilgrimage next year, I’m testing out equipment. Everything needs to be as light as possible, because I’m going to be carrying it on my back for 30 days across 500 miles.

My Liturgy of the Hours is way too heavy, particularly the Easter Season volume, which is the one I’d be taking. I swear the thing weighs a pound and a half. Since this would be almost 20% of my equipment weight allowance, I’ll have to find something else.

As a book addict, I’ve acquired a number of small breviaries over the years, both monastic and Roman. The smallest and lightest of these is actually an earlier edition of the bulky Benedictine Daily Prayer, called simply A Short Breviary. Yes, I’m aware the title is redundant.

I’ve been trying it out the past few days.

It was published in 1962. And right about now, the more astute of you will realize that it was published before the liturgical and calendar reforms of 1970. In this breviary, today is not the Feast of Saint Thomas.

OK fair enough, they moved his feast because it was getting tangled up in Advent.

But the changes are not little things. Yesterday, for example, in my little old-calendar breviary was the Feast of the Visitation, which is nowadays celebrated on 31 May.

Why did they move it? No idea.

Sunday the 1st was the Feast of the Most Precious Blood. The readings and prayers in the breviary were well put together and moving, yet this feast no longer exists at all.

Why?

I confess that nothing about the calendar reform makes any sense to me. Feasts were moved willy-nilly, Octaves and feasts were actively suppressed or simply removed from the calendar.

With the growing popularity of the Extraordinary Form (which uses the old calendar), these dueling calendars are going to become an increasing problem. The whole point of a calendar is to know which day it is today. If you’ve got two conflicting calendars, this basic mission of the calendar fails.

As I look at the two calendars, the older calendar has a richness and rhythm that I don’t see in the new, whereas the newer one is considerably less confusing and baroque than the old.

The simplification of how feasts are ranked in the new calendar is its greatest strength, I think. If we could apply that to the old calendar, we’d have the best of both worlds.

So far, my short, old-calendar breviary is the lightest and smallest I’ve found, but it still manages to pack in a great number of propers for a plethora of feasts, as well as readings for Matins. The fact that I’m slightly out of synch with the Ordinary Form doesn’t bother me too much, for I am a bit of a medievalist.

Actually, it sounds perfect for a pilgrimage.