Light a tie up

Abstract

It is Friday night in April and I am in my kitchen, attending to last minute details on a spring supper of asparagus, lamb and strawberries, when the house is filled with the sound of glorious singing from the church across the road. All during the day, people across the islands of Malta and Gozo have been braving the patchy weather to walk the streets behind a church procession bearing aloft a statue of the Virgin Mary. This is id-Duluri, the day of Our Lady of Sorrows, the Friday before Palm Sunday, and the start of the saddest week in the Christian calendar, known as Holy Week. I’m not sure what they are singing in the church; it is a kind of melodic recitation, and it turns out that some parishes have decided against taking an old, and often precious statue of the Virgin out of doors into the rain and opted to say the rosary in the church instead. I grew up in a house without a bible, but the story is a bit more complicated, as family history often is. My mother was raised a Catholic and my adoptive father came from a mix of Irish and Scottish ancestors, all steeped in the tradition of the soap-scrubbed, finger-pointing, guilt-mongering Protestant church, or at least, that’s how it was described to me. The agreement in our house was that religion was not to be discussed as it might lead to bloodshed, or worse. But we still had Easter eggs, and chocolate bunnies, and indeed, I am planning to give my dinner guests chocolate eggs with coffee tonight. But why?