February Update

Firstly, we are now well into the season of “Laus tibi Domine, Rex aeterne gloriae.” Happy Septuagesima!A keen reader found a very old typo in my Little Office Compline PDFs - somehow, long ago, I had typed up “Lumen et revelationem gentium” instead of “Lumen ad revelationem gentium”. That has been fixed in the files at littleoffice.brandt.id.au/#booklets Refreshing the files at Gumroad and Udemy will take a little longer.Looking back at last month’s update, I did manage to accomplish one of the three goals, that of running through the explanation of rubrics in the Benziger Brothers 1914 Little Office book. It took two videos. Unfortunately they are recorded in fairly low resolution as my usual video device was being used elsewhere, so I used an old iPad which I had previously set to low resolution video, as sometimes a small person fills up the hard drive… anyway here they are:And the second installment looking more into the ceremonial aspects:The other two goals were a bit more ambitious - to explain how to sing psalms and make a course on singing Roman Compline.The real answer to the question “how does one psing psalms?” is that one can psing them in any way one desires. Of course, coming from a background in singing psalms in the western chant tradition in Latin, that’s going to be the way I will gravitate towards, but there are many different ways to sing. I’ve been singing with many different people with many different styles and realising that singing in itself is a valuable skill to cultivate. Our culture seems to push people away from singing into being passive consumers of mass produced noise. Any sort of singing is better than nothing.The photo above captures my current list of ideas for Youtube videos. I’m always open to suggestions. Someone asked me how I would recite the Chaplet of the Holy Face in English and I started drawing diagrams describing my interpretation of the description in the 1789 Holy Face Manual, but co-ordinating all the elements of making videos seems to be more difficult than I remember.Also, this particular substack is devoted to the Little Office of Our Lady and sometimes I go outside that area. I have another podcast called the Latin Mass Homeschool Family, which is hosted with Spotify. Unfortunately Spotify has a policy of only hosting podcast episodes which are predominantly spoken. They recently deleted 32 episodes from my Latin Mass Family podcast without warning. I tried contacting them about getting back up copies, but turned out their system was not set up to cater for that service. The episodes were all from the 100 days of Chant challenge which I set myself a few years ago. Fortunately they are all still on Youtube. The recordings I was most concerned about were the family recordings of singing Compline, which would have been very difficult to recreate, and are all linked into a little blog at compline.brandt.id.au. Fortunately all those recordings passed Spotify’s test for being mostly spoken.That gives me yet another goal, to migrate the Latin Mass Homeschool Podcast to a more music-friendly host. I’ll put that job alongside updating the wowchemy themes on my webpages to hugo blocks.But all this pales in comparison with what seem to be our Holy Father the Pope’s last days on earth. Let us pray for the Pope.Ave María. Grátia plena. Dóminus tecum. Benedícta tu in muliéribus et benedíctus fructus ventris tui, Jesus. Sancta María Mater Dei. Ora pro nobis peccatóribus, nunc et in hora mortis nostrae. Amen. Get full access to Little Office of the Blessed Virgin Mary at littleoffice.substack.com/subscribe