Monday, 17 June 2019

Liturgical Blessing of the Lawnmower

The Liturgical Lawnmower is wheeled from the Lawnmower Shed to the Moot House.

Hymn: Spare us the Cutter (E. Bunnyman)

Archdruid: Behold the new community mower!

All: Oooh!

Archdruid: We ask that blessings be poured out upon this mower like oil.

All: And not drop from the heavens, like unto the not-so-gentle rain which falleth like that which would cause even Noah to furrow the Noahic brow.

Archdruid: Let it not cut so short that the grass suffereth in times of drought.

All: Nor so long that we can't spot the gifts with which Grendel the Community Cat blesses the lawn.

Archdruid: Let it cut those light and dark stripes which are so clever we think it might be magic.

All: Let it be a lot less bovver than a hover.

Melissa Sparrow: Let it be loud enough that it scareth off the little beasties that lurk in long grass. Let us not find the dismembered remnants of hedgehogs, the limbs of toads, eyes of frogs, livers of shrews, spleens of field-mice, death death death death death.

Archdruid: But let us rejoice in the smell of new-mown grass.

Melissa: Which is the smell of the grassy fear of death! Death death death!

Archdruid: Surely not?

Melissa: Yeath! I mean, yes! Death! Death! Death!

Archdruid: And let us pray for good weather to cut the grass.

All: For the rain it raineth every day.

Archdruid: For surely it is  an electric mower.

Melissa: And to use it in the rain would mean....

All: Death?

Melissa: Death. Death. Death. Death.

All: You know, this isn't as lighthearted as we'd expected.

Hymn: A Hard Rain's Gonna Fall

8 comments :

  1. But what colour is it this season?

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  2. I wonder what the Latin for lawnmower is?

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  3. Recessional hymn: Keep them Mowin’ Blades Sharp (Banks/Collins/Gabriel/Hackett/Rutherford.

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  4. Pardon the quibble, but surely a "liturgical lawnmower" mows lawns made of liturgies. One might say that it pares them down to size, which could be related to separating the liturgical wheat from the liturgical chaff. In that sense, it might be understood as a threshing machine.

    This post is about the liturgical act of blessing a lawnmower, which is different.

    Yours in pedantry,
    Ann from Canada

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  5. Dear Ann, fellow pedant…. I suppose one might, charitably, interpret the expression “liturgical lawnmower” in the loose sense of “this is the lawnmower that we bless liturgically - as opposed to the other lawnmower, the one that we don’t bother to bless”.

    Just sayin’. Time for my medication.

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