Category: emoji

The English word is a small surprise: Lent comes from an old word for spring, the season when the days lengthen. Most other languages simply count, from the Latin quadragesima, “the fortieth”. Forty days, Sundays excluded, to prepare for Easter, in memory of the forty days Jesus spent in the desert. A Lent emoji would…

The word comes from the Greek kathedra, a seat. Before it is anything else, a cathedral is a chair: the bishop’s chair, from which he teaches and presides over the liturgy of his diocese. The towers, rose windows and gargoyles came later. There is no cathedral emoji, and the keyboard’s ⛪, with its little steeple…

“The Body of Christ.” “Amen.” It may be the shortest exchange of the whole Mass, and one of the densest. Four words on one side, one on the other, and a line of parishioners moving slowly toward the altar. To say all that in a text, there is no Body of Christ emoji: 🍞 is…

On 1 November 1950, in St Peter’s Square, Pope Pius XII defined as dogma something Christians had been celebrating for centuries: at the end of her earthly life, Mary was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven. This is the Assumption, celebrated every 15 August, and so far there is no Assumption…

“Suscipe me, Domine”: “Uphold me, Lord, according to your word, and I shall live.” In Benedictine monasteries, on the day of profession, the monk or nun sings this psalm verse and the whole community answers by repeating it three times. The Rule of Saint Benedict has called for it since the sixth century. It is…

“Watch therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour” (Matt 25:13). Jesus ends the parable of the ten bridesmaids with these words: ten young women waiting for the bridegroom, lamps in hand, some well prepared, others running out of oil. Monks took the advice seriously. In many abbeys, Vigils is sung in the…

Why does the Virgin so often wear a blue mantle? Partly for a very down-to-earth reason. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, painters’ finest blue, ultramarine, was made by grinding lapis lazuli shipped from Afghanistan, and it could cost more than gold. So it was saved for the most precious figure in the picture.…

Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, who found the great staircase of perfection far too steep, dreamed of an elevator to lift her up to Jesus. She found it in the end, she writes: it was the arms of Jesus, carrying her because she was little. The spiritual life often comes down to that image. You do…

Late afternoon in an abbey. The bell rings, the monks leave the workshop or the garden and file into the choir, while a few visitors slip into the back pews. This is Vespers, the Church’s evening prayer, from the Latin vesper, evening, also the name of the evening star. There is no vespers emoji yet,…

On the evening of 31 October, children in costumes ring doorbells and demand candy. Fewer of them know that Halloween is short for All Hallows’ Eve, the night before All Saints’ Day. The next morning, 1 November, the Church celebrates all the saints, and there is no All Saints’ Day emoji to say so: the…