Electric Prayer

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We are just over half way through Lent, and Laetare Sunday has just celebrated the fact. The vestments at Mass were not a Lenten deep purple, but paler and whiter: the books call the colour “rose”. The opening antiphon at Mass didn’t tell us to repent or be sad: it said “be filled with joy”. Laetare Ierusalem, it said in Latin – which is how this Sunday got its name. Even the short reading at Lauds (from the prophet Nehemiah) hammered the point home:

This day is sacred to the Lord your God. Do not be mournful, do not weep. For this day is sacred to our Lord. Do not be sad: the joy of the Lord is your stronghold.

It isn’t really a question of taking time off from Lent like half time in a football match, of relaxing the pressure just a bit and even daringly letting ourselves have half a glass of wine at lunch. The joy of Laetare Sunday is more real and more direct. It is real joy because Lent itself is about joy. Lent leads us up to the joy of resurrection and brings us into a state in which we are capable of receiving joy – just as, you might say, our whole lives are an exercise in making ourselves capable of receiving the joys of heaven.

The podcast

The big new feature in Universalis this time is a weekly podcast. It is roughly 10 minutes long and it talks about the coming week, its themes and liturgy. If you are signed up for the daily emails from Universalis you may already have seen a link to it: it comes out on Friday, to give you time to listen to it before Sunday arrives.

The podcast is listed in both Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and you can use either of those apps to subscribe to it. All other podcast apps have access to it as well. You can listen on this page, which also contains full instructions for subscribing.

If your blog reader can handle these things directly (not all of them can), there will be a Play button in the box below which lets you listen to the current episode. We hope you enjoy it.

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Let us all keep one another in our prayers, as always.