A celebration for Ascension Day on BBC Radio 4

Above:  listing in the Radio Times.

Today is Ascension Day.  At 8 o'clock I listened to a live broadcast of the Ascension Day service from St Martins in the Fields in Trafalgar Square.  Vaughan Williams psalm.  The Archbishop of Canterbury gave the sermon and talked about "the great truth".  The hymn Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken (which is never heard - I can't remember when I last heard this hymn).  A life broadcast always seems much more significant than a recorded version.

Since the medieval period the three days before Ascension Day have been marked by Rogation processions or walks around the parish boundaries combined with blessing the crops and reading the Gospels in the open air.  The Rogation processions were fixed in England as far back as 747 (the Council of Cloveshoo) which makes the custom one of the most ancient ceremonies still surviving - a fragment of the Anglo-Saxon world.  Ronald Hutton records examples of refreshments being provided on the routes by farmers anxious for their crops to be blessed.

You can listen to the broadcast on BBC iplayer http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/radio

 

















Above:  surprisingly the live broadcast was highlighted in The Times (admittedly a very small highlight - The Times prefers to sneer at the Church of England and employs as religious correspondent the pedestrian journalist Ruth Gledhill - formulaic contrarian style of simply disagreeing with whatever she is writing about, presumably on the grounds that this will make her controversial and daring - her Twitter account is http://twitter.com/#!/ruthiegledhill).

Recently there seems to be a pattern emerging of churches holding Ascension Day services on the tops of towers: 

St Johns College Cambridge http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/chapel_and_choir/chapel/ascension_day/

Southwark Cathedral http://www.london-se1.co.uk/news/view/997

Exeter College Oxford http://www.exeter.ox.ac.uk/alumni/news/item?gid=1273846893