91Èȱ¬

From Father Christopher Jamison, Benedictine Monk:

One day a man was walking through a slave market in Rome and saw some young men who didn’t have the sun tanned complexion of Mediterranean people. He asked where they were from and was told they were Angles from the land of the Anglo Saxons, to which he replied: ‘They’re not Angles, they’re angels; they should share the life of the angels.’ The man was Pope Gregory I whose feast day is today. He was so inspired by his own play on words that he set about converting the Anglo Saxons to Christianity. Legend has it that he set out personally to bring the Gospel to these fair skinned people but after four days a locust landed on his bible; the Latin for locust is locusta which he interpreted as meaning stay where you are (locus sta.) So he turned back and dispatched a mission to Kent led by the monk Augustine. In 597 Augustine arrived in Canterbury and converted Aethelbert, King of the Angles. The rest is history, our English history, a history profoundly shaped by Christian faith. We can see signs of Pope Gregory’s mission all around us. In a way every church in the land is a testimony his desire to make the Angles into angels but there are some more specific signs of Gregory’s work to be found here. For example, he is the man after whom Gregorian chant is named, that’s the chant sung by Catholic monks to this day. Not sure what this sounds like? I’ll sing a little for you. Gloria in Excelsis Deo.

Whether believers or not, on the day when we remember the man known as Gregory the Great, the people of England can still enjoy so many aspects of his legacy from awesome church buildings and beautiful church music to the good news of the Gospel that nobody is beyond redemption, not even the sun starved English.