In This House of Brede

by Rumer Godden

The Church is like a wise mother and has given us this great cycle of the liturgical year with its different words and colours. You’ll see how you will learn to welcome the feast days and the saints’ days as they come round, each with a different story and, as it were, a different aspect; they grow very dear, though still exacting.’

‘Prayer has power.’ Philippa had said that to Richard, as she had said it to Penny. ‘It’s the only thing that holds when everything else fails.

That is the blessing of the liturgy, it wipes out self.’

‘The Church has got blood poisoning,’ said Dame Perpetua, ‘and I think because it has lost the disinfectant of the Creed.’ The Creed, touchstone and measure of the Faith, was only said now at Mass on Sundays and on important feast days. ‘We used to say it every day – and we need it. If we had it, had to keep to it, there couldn’t be all the defections, and the small things wouldn’t matter.’

‘Life in Christ is no trick of the imagination,’ she had often said, ‘but solid theological fact.’