Urdu BCP discovery

This morning, the car was covered with a thick white frost. I drove to St German's for the midweek Mass without incident. We celebrated St Agnes' Day, a day early, one of the Parish patron saints, as it was the main church dedication of my first Parish in Bristol. No school class attended this week, perhaps because staff had experienced trouble getting into work on time, given how icy it might be out of town. It struck me this time how contemporary is the story of this fourth century teenage martyr. The prospect of a forced marriage, and what was from another angle the Roman equivalent of an honour killing, after she refused to recant her faith, or to marry as required. These are still themes that are being encountered across the world today. Civilasation? The human race is still lacks it, despite our pretence to sophistication.

Afterwards, I transferred to Hamid's phone a .pdf file of the Book of Common Prayer translated into Urdu Latin script for him to explore. It was something I'd found in Google's free digital text library, scanned from a hard copy in a California library. It really needs some editing to make it easier to navigate, and I must print out some of its texts for him to be able to read more easily. 

A more modern Sunday Missal in Urdu I have so far not succeeded in tracking down. But it's a start, and an important one, as the BCP is such a great milestone in the history of vernacular religious texts, available to everyone. I imagine it will read as more quainly and exotic than any contemporary biblical translation, but it its deeply biblical content says a great deal about Anglicanism as an expression of Christian discipleship, everyone needs to be acquainted with in some measure.

I then took the car back to the garage for checking, and walked to the CBS office to put in a few hours before returning home. At the end of the afternoon, Clare said the garage had been in touch and had reported a cylinder head gasket had gone. Not surprising given the succession of recent overheatings due to a leak I failed to deal with. She gave them the go-ahead straight away, but we will be without the car for several days, and it won't be a cheap repair either. Ah well, we made a decision to stick with the car for now, and the consequences are unavoidable.