All We Like Sheeple

I receive a letter from Randy Swineherd, of Botley:

Dear Archdruid or, if I may, "Sir"

I was intrigued to read that your fellowship uses only ancient liturgies. And so last week I made an investigative "pilgrimage" to your community, under the cunning pseudonym of Mandy Shepherd.

I have to tell you that you have been deceived. Your "Morning in the Forest' prayer, for instance, is not the "Neolithic Acclamation of the Creator at the Rising of the Sun" that you claim. Rather you have pasted it together from various modern rituals you found on the Internet, replacing "Apollo", "Ra", "Pan", or "Woden" with "God". At least, when you remembered.

Why will you not turn to the purity of the Book of Common Prayer, the King James Bible, and the original Hymns Ancient and Modern? (Personally I will only choose Tate and Brady psalm settings for hymnody, but you are clearly infants in the faith and require milk, not strong meat).

I remember my grandfather telling me the relief he felt when the 1928 Prayer Book was rightly defeated. He told me the people of Stanford-in-the-Vale burnt Pusey on their November 5th bonfire that year. An effigy, of course. Not the man himself.

But then the Revisionists and Satan himself (or possibly herself - I am not a reactionary when it comes to the pronouns of the Dark One) produced the New English Bible, the New Revised Standard Version, the Even Newer Even More Revised Standard Version, the Nearly Revised Substandard Version, "I Can't Believe It's not the Standard Version" XLII, the Alternative Service Book, Common Worship and its many spin-off series.

Frankly, when I look at all the different books in the Common Worship franchise - the Church Warden's Guide, the Pewfillers' Handbook, the Minister's Manual, Fiend Folio: Times and Seasons and so on - I realise whose hand is behind all of this. It is the Dark One again, with his/her/their ungodly message of forgiveness and love, when we should be grovelling in terror before the all-seeing Eyeball of Wrath, and singing penitential psalms to a battered harmonium in the dark of a Lincolnshire fen church with no heating. Or electricity. Or roof.

Things could only be better if it rained.

Wake up, sheeple! Throw away that glass of mRNA vaccine you were about to consume! Stop debating which gender you want to be this afternoon! Turn from your ways, Archdruid. Save your soul and turn to the true English religion of misery, damp and fear.

Wishing you all God's blessings for the Advent season.

Yours etc

Randy Swineherd