At long last…
I have finally gotten around to some long-lingering kalendar updates to the breviary. They’re not done yet, but there is some new stuff in there.
I’d had the codes for the items in Great Cloud of Witnesses in the saints table for some time now, but had never gotten around to actually hooking that in to the options; it’s in now.
The bigger news, though, is that the new commemorations and collects for the trial use Lesser Feasts & Fasts 2018 are in and can be selected as an option. As with all Episcopal kalendars in recent years, there are things to like and not like about LFF 2018. On the whole, it’s much better than its two predecessors—and I say that as the chief architect of Great Cloud of Witnesses…
In putting together GCW, we (I) tried to thread the needle too finely. I wanted to try and please as many folks as we could, both those who wanted a broad expanse of folks—including many with whom they were unfamiliar—and those who wanted to only celebrate as saints those they believed were genuinely saints. In essence, I went too “meta” with the notion that these were all options and that local communities should canonize and celebrate those they regarded as saints. This nuance appears to have been largely missed by the voters at General Convention and the broader church.
Oh well.
What LFF 2018 accomplished was to salvage and continue the work on the collects that we had begun with GCW. It also tried to balance the representation on the kalendar. I’m sure some see this as liberal pandering; I don’t. Instead, the saints do need to portray the full span of humanity as faithful witness of Christ’s resurrection power, not just a list of well-connected French & Italian bishops (looking at you, RC calendar of the 1890’s) or a list of white missionary Anglican bishops in the Americas (looking at you, early versions of LFF).
What I have not done yet is to thoroughly incorporate the collect changes of LFF 2018 throughout the kalendars as a whole. That is, I now offer 5 Episcopal kalendar options in the breviary:
- The original 1979 kalendar
- The official Lesser Feasts & Fasts (2006)
- The now superseded Holy Women, Holy Men (because there are some who still like and use it)
- The “made available” Great Cloud of Witnesses
- The “authorized for trial use” Lesser Feasts & Fasts (2018)
Right now, the first four are all using the Holy Women, Holy Men collects (except for the new additions to GCW); the fifth contains the new ones.
In the next week or two, I am going to replace the HWHM collects with the LFF 2018 collects (for the commemorations for which they are available). There are two reasons for this:
- I think the LFF 2018 collects are objectively better than the (current) HWHM collects
- The trial use collects need to be used so that the Church gets an experience of them
So—if you’re one who pays close attention to the collects, you’ll be seeing that change soon.