He must increase, but I must decrease
Edwin Muir's Knox ruined nation and two obscure Saints of the Dunkeld Litany
In the Coracle this Week:
Two Saints of the Dunkeld Litany – St. Dovenald and St. Crathlinthus
One of the most attractive elements in Christian theology is the Communion of Saints. The members of this communion are almost without number. When God promises the Patriarch Abraham descendants that will number as the stars, and as the sand of the seashore, we have but a glimpse of the sheer multitude that participate in the Heavenly realm. To put it i…
Edwin Muir and the “Knox-ruined nation”
“For Scotland I sing, / the Knox-ruined nation”: these lines are part of “Prologue”, the first poem of George Mackay Brown’s debut collection. It is a sort of defiant poetic manifesto and here Brown allies the creative work of the artist with God’s holy men and women, the saints, in order to reconstruct Scotland, a nation “ruined” by the catastrophic…
Important days in November:
Not only is this the month of the Souls in Purgatory, we have the Solemnity of Christ the King of the Universe, then a week later the feast of his dear Saint Andrew on the 30th. If you are in Edinburgh why not visit the national shrine?
At the Coracle we work hard to reveal as much of our nations Catholic history as we can; we talk about philosophy, politics, literature - but our hope is that all this leads you to whole point of everything - our Lord Jesus Christ, the King of the Universe. What the upcoming Solemnity and indeed this holy month of Souls should teach us is to decrease so He may increase (St John’s Gospel 3:30).
In 1982 Pope St John Paul II when giving to Cardinal Gray relics of Saint Andrew he said:
‘St Andrew gave Jesus all that was available and Jesus miraculously fed those five thousand people and still had something left over. It is exactly the same with your own lives. Left alone to face the difficult challenges of life today, you feel conscious of your own inadequacy and afraid of what the future may hold. I say to you this: place your lives in the hands of Jesus. He will accept you and bless you, and will make such use of your lives as will be beyond your greatest expectation!”