The lengthiest readings of the liturgical year occur at the Liturgy of the Passion on Good Friday, when we hear the longest of Isaiah’s “servant songs” (Isaiah 52:13 to 53:12) and – after a modest chunk of Hebrews 4 and 5 – two full chapters of St John’s Gospel, taking us from Jesus setting forth across the Kidron valley to the unnamed garden where he will be arrested, to the burial of Christ by Joseph of Arimathea in a new tomb in another unnamed garden.
For much of my Dominican life I have been in Oxford, where the Passion is sung in English to the traditional Dominican tune, and more often than not I have been cast as “Ancilla”, as we call the part that encompasses all the solo players apart from Christ himself (it is named after the first such, the maid at the door, ancilla being the Latin for maid).
