22 NOVEMBER

. . . .is kept in honor of St. Cecilia, the patroness of singers and musicians. Some images of St. Cecilia represented in art can be found here.

The story of St. Cecilia as related in Caxton’s Golden Legende can be found here.

The cypress-wood coffin containing her beheaded body dressed in gold brocade can still be seen in her church in the Trastevere section of Rome. Quenta Narwenion has already printed Dryden’s “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day” here so I won’t do it all in this blog. Just a taste:

But bright Cecilia rais'd the wonder high'r;
When to her organ, vocal breath was giv'n,
An angel heard, and straight appear'd
Mistaking earth for Heav'n.


On this day in 1963, at 5:30 in the evening, C. S. Lewis died at his home at The Kilns after a long battle with heart failure and kidney problems. His death was largely overlooked at the time as this was the same day that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. There will be no shortage of retrospectives on JFK. But I find C. S. Lewis of more lasting interest. Science fiction, children’s stories, novels, Christian apologetics, all came from his pen. There is a gallimaufry of C. S. Lewis links here. This blog’s address commemorates one of Lewis’s ‘locals’ in Oxford.



"I wish they'd remember that the charge to Peter was,
'Feed my sheep', not 'Try experiments on my laboratory rats',
or even 'Teach my performing dogs new tricks.' " -C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcom