Letters from 24
to 30 March 2008
Like all
letters to the editor everywhere, these letters are the opinions of
the writers and not Anglicans Online. We publish letters that we think
will be of interest to our readers, whether we agree with them or not.
If you'd like to write a letter of your own, click here.
Don't
leave us hanging
Wait a
gosh-darned minute! What
happened to the guy that was dying?
Is he
dead? Is he still alive? Should we know his condition now that you
punted last week's thought-provoking anxiety?
How did
you not start this week's cover -- whether Easter or not -- with
the news? As
we used to say, Jesus Christ.
Peter
Winterble
Buenos Aires
peter@winterble.com
24 March 2008
(We're
sorry to have left you in the dark. We were too busy weeping, pressing
our mourning clothes, and booking tickets to Burlington New Jersey
to get every detail correct, though we did update our front page
with the sad news. We buried Frederic McFarland under bright blue
skies in the churchyard of St Mary's Church, with the Bishop of New
Jersey presiding. Now look what you've done. We have tears on our
keyboard again. Thank you for asking. As you can tell, we miss him
terribly, and we are running short-staffed trying to get Anglicans
Online published without him.)
Writing
not in sand but in Fe3O4
I wrote
a letter you published some
years ago,about the possibility of raising funding by offering to
maintain a memorial section on AO - a kind of virtual necropolis
- with a one-off fee for a 'plot'.
The sad
death of your clearly much loved colleague
Mr McFarland prompts me to renew this suggestion.
Many people are actually unable to visit any longer the actual memorial
sites of those who meant much to them, and it would be a comfort to
read on-line a few words and a couple of dates. A disclaimer could be
signed as part of any application form.
With best wishes and Easter greetings to you all!
Joseph
Hooper
Our Lady of Jesmond, TTAC
Newcastle upon Tyne, England
25 March 2008
(Ed:
this is not a bad idea, but our computer expert says that the server
computers hosting Anglicans Online (or anything else) are far more
ephemeral than a good
hunk of rock. In order to make an online
memorial work, we'd need to set up an organization that would be
self-sustaining and self-funding in perpetuity. That's hard. You
may have noticed that the Anglicans Online server computers were
offline for about 6 hours just as Frederic died. We told ourselves
that he stopped on the way out to muck with our network router
to make sure we'd notice that he was gone.)
A rose
on the paschal fire
Your editorial regarding the tradition of the ashes of a rose being able to be 'reborn'
into a fresh rose may have solved a 20-year-old mystery for me.
At an
Easter Vigil service I attended at one of New Zealand's cathedrals
the paschal candle was not decorated with the 'ususal' decorations
of Alpha, Omega, the year etc, but rather, the candle had a single
rose attached to it.
I have
never seen this anywhere either before or since. Does anyone else
know of this way of decorating a paschal candle? Is it perhaps an
exuberance of the Sarum Use?
Robert
McLean
St Paul's, Burwood
Sydney, NSW, Australia
robert_m_sydney@yahoo.com
27 March 2008
(Ed: perhaps
one of our readers might know. This is the sort of thing that Cynthia
(one of our editors) tends to know, but she's off visiting her mother
after the devastation of burying her husband this year and her father
last year.)
Earlier letters
We launched our 'Letters
to AO' section on 11 May 2003. All published letters are in our
archives.
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