Coffee after First Friday Mass

On the first Friday of the month we generally celebrate a votive Mass of the Sacred Heart at St Pancras. During the great seasons of the Church votive Masses are not usually celebrated and anyway, today was the commmemoration of St Charles Lwanga and his companions, the Ugandan martyrs. The Easter weekday reading from the Acts of the Apostles reminds us of a vow St Paul took which led him to cut off his hair! I love HV Morton's A Traveller in Rome. In the book HVM speaks about the tradition in apostolic iconography which depicts St Peter with  a full head of hair and St Paul  as almost bald. The tradition is believed to go back to the days of Nero and to those who knew the Apostles by sight. How could this be? HVM offers us this explanation:

I was reminded of a story which the late Monsignor Stapylton Barnes was fond of telling to illustrate the length of human memory. His mother, who died in 1927 at a great age, could clearly remember, as a small girl, hearing Victoria proclaimed queen in 1837. When a child she was often taken to see a very old lady who remembered the French Revolution and the execution of Marie Antoinette in 1793. This old lady had spent her childhood in Philadelphia and had known Benjamin Franklin, who was born in 1706. Thus it would have been possible for Franklin to have described some event in his early childhood-perhaps the great fire of Boston in 1711-to the little girl, who could have told it in her old age to another little girl, Mrs Barnes, who could pass on the story to her son in the twentieth century.
In his book The Martyrdom of St Peter and St Paul, Monsignor Barnes refers to the great sweep of human events commanded by such lives, and says 'it would have been possible for a Christian child in Rome in the year 67 to have been actually present at St Peter's martyrdom and to have seen him nailed to the cross, and still to have been alive and able to tell the tale in 150. And the child to whom he told it then could have told the story again in his extreme old age to one who lived to see the peace of the Church in 312 under Constantine.' 

After Mass Jill & Avril made us a superior cup of coffee together with those lovely fig biscuits which take me right back to my childhood.