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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
It is the year 1117 and the place is the little Church in the Orcadian Island of Egilsay. It is Easter and the Service is in progress. The people have heard the Epistle and Gospel, and now they are bringing their gifts to the old priest. The bread and wine is the sign of the giving of themselves; in an Orcadian writer's words: ‘With these they offer God everything that is theirs — their bunions, their jars of oil, bright hearthstones, the long nights they lie awake listening to the sea on the rocks when the fishermen are out’. Says the priest, ‘Will it be, perhaps, that one or two of these same earthy people will be quickened, that the green shoot and the golden stalk will soar out of their brutishness, fit ones for the threshing floors of purgatory? Doubtless. All of them, I pray. For this we were born. … Once more I have done it. What seems to be impossible has happened. The Body and the Blood of Our Lord lie on the altar before me. It is accomplished. The church is drowned in a terrible and beautiful silence. … God is come among us. Our little gifts of bread and wine he returns to us loaded with blessing and beauty and peace and love and glory illimitable. Ecce Agnus Dei. Himself he gives to us. … And so now when I bless the people of Egilsay at the end of the Mass, I bless him in particular whose face is as bright and as doomed as a stone with spring sunlight on it that the builders will soon gather into a new wall.
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