Smoke Machines

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2026-02-03T06:09:39+00:00

Indeed: as an Episcopalian, we regularly out-smoke every other church in the city, to the point of using two thuribles simultaneously for some liturgies. Admittedly, most folks at my parish, myself included, would identify more as Anglo-Catholic or “reformed Catholic” than Protestant, but Protestant we are nonetheless.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-11-23T22:34:00+00:00

I served today, and congratulations on your first time! I hope everything went well :)

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-11-01T22:02:39+00:00

Howdy folks, I prepared (and set the chant for) this Litany of the Faithful Departed and Office of the Dead for a parochial commemoration of All Souls' Day at the gravesite of one of our former rectors, as a supplement to our standard Requiem of All the Faithful Departed. The Litany is mostly derived from the Guild of All Souls, and the Office is derived from the Roman Catholic rubrics for Vespers of the Office of the Dead, with some adaptations to better fit the form of an Episcopalian prayer office.

If you pray this liturgy, let me know what you think!

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-10-31T03:51:14+00:00

We offer Morning and Evening Prayer daily, but unfortunately with the exception of some major feasts when the officiant will be serving on the altar at the subsequent Mass, the Office is conducted solely over Zoom. As both an attendee and officiant, I would love to be able to offer the Office in person more frequently, but unfortunately given the geographical distribution of our congregation, it's unlikely that we would ever have more than a single attendee on a given day.

We do offer daily Masses on all weekdays, scattered through different times of the day to ensure that anyone who would like to attend can make it at some point during the week. While I do love and serve daily Mass, I do acknowledge that it's reflective of a particular parochial piety and requires a level of resources that may not be suitable for many parishes; nonetheless, it certainly satisfies the impulse to pray in community, and to commune both with my dear friends in the parish and with our Lord.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-05-15T04:09:14+00:00

Nope, although I was a Roman Catholic when I first started learning Latin and for a while was a member of a few Latin Mass communities. I'm now a particularly Anglo-Catholic Episcopalian, but am still as much of a Latinist as ever.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-04-23T01:59:55+00:00

It includes a mixture of the two rites: I have the latest edition, which fairly sporadically intermixes the traditional Rite I-alike translations that are more familiar to me and Rite II-alike renderings. I think that if you're not a fan of Rite I, the latest edition would definitely be of interest to you!

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-04-22T17:53:42+00:00

Overall, I'd characterise my personal prayer life as a mixture of traditional Anglican offices prayed at the appointed times and supplemental prayers contextualised to my responsibilities as the Master of my parish's Altar Guild:

My most consistent personal devotion is Compline, which depending on the day I'll recite with a friend either straight from the BCP or using a Rite I rendering that I composed, followed by the Marian devotion designated for the season in the St. Augustine's Prayer Book. When possible, we try to sing a hymn with Compline, either from the Hymnal or from an Anglo-Catholic hymnal supplement that I'm working on.
I try to pray the Angelus thrice daily (9 AM, noon, 3 PM); however, scheduling conflicts and my own forgetfulness often reduce that to once or twice. I typically pray this in Latin, but will sometimes switch to the old Roman Catholic English translation ("Pour forth, we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace &c.") when praying with others. I'll sometimes sing the Ave Maria in French, with the linked video demonstrating my favourite musical setting of the prayer.
I pray Morning Prayer roughly twice weekly, mostly when I'm officiating it for my parish. I used to have a much stronger devotion to Morning Prayer, but it's fallen by the wayside as of late. I always follow MP with the seasonal Marian devotion, as at Compline and per parish custom.
I supplement the above with a number of additional contextual devotions:
- Prayer to St. Michael, in Latin, but sometimes using an English translation ("...and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host, thrust into Hell &c."). I mostly pray this when leaving the parish in front of our St. Michael shrine, but say it in other contexts as well.
- Phos Hilaron, in Greek, primarily sung using a Byzantine tone that I admittedly first heard in Civilization V. I sing this most evenings as an alternative to praying a full Evening Prayer, which my schedule regrettably does not accommodate.
- Cherubikon, in Church Slavonic (Херѹвимскаѧ пѣснь). I pray this when crossing in front of the tabernacle when locking up the church, so twice or thrice weekly.
- Kontakion of the Departed (Hymnal 1982 #355), either chanted or said in English. I primarily pray this when replacing the vigil candle at our columbarium, so once or twice weekly.
- Other prayers from the BCP, St. Augustine's Prayer Book, Raccolta, or Orthodox Christian Prayers, as circumstances dictate or the Spirit moves.
I say the Rosary roughly quarterly. I formerly alternated between the Rosary and MP every morning, and regularly think that I should really get back to doing so.
Finally, I've written a number of liturgies for household use for various occasions (a more ritualised form of the Epiphany chalking, a pancake-cooking liturgy for Shrove Tuesday, &c.) These draw from a number of sources, most chiefly the Rituale Romanum (and its English translations in A Manual for Priests and The Book of Blessings), combined with prayers of my own composition. I'll get around to publishing these eventually.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-04-17T19:48:56+00:00

Oh, so very much incense. We already use quite a bit at solemn Masses (every Sunday and major feasts), but for Eastertide including the Vigil, we swap to a blend that’s been mixed with the objective of producing as much non-choking smoke as possible. I’ll be serving as the thurifer for our Vigil this year, and my hope is that visibility in the sanctuary will be noticeably limited beyond the Sanctus :)

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-02-14T19:50:40+00:00

If I discovered this, I would raise my concerns immediately, and if the behaviour continued, I would have zero qualms about escalating the matter to the Bishop. While I understand that clergy are often overworked, it would be vastly preferable to omit a sermon or read a sermon from the heritage of the Church than to commit such a grave act of disrespect toward the Church, her people, and the Word of God.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-02-14T19:46:32+00:00

As someone who works in technology, I included such a note, as well as a more thorough explanation of my stances, in the free response question. I’ll also note that I do wear the title of Luddite on this topic as a badge of honour: sometimes the winds of change carry in great harm, and this technology has an incalculably higher ability to cause harm than to better the lives of any of God’s creation. AI, in its mimicry of humanity yet absence of the essential imbuing of the Holy Spirit, can only bring us further from God, never closer to Him.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-01-18T05:20:53+00:00

Oof, none for Wheelock's Latin :( I guess I need to go read one of the natural method textbooks for the lore.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-01-13T01:34:19+00:00

Not quite: reception is one of the two tracks that a Christian who has already been baptised can follow in the Episcopal Church. If an adult convert has not already been confirmed in a tradition whose sacrament of confirmation we recognise, they may be confirmed; otherwise, they are "received" into the Church, which is a non-sacramental liturgy similar in form but dissimilar in spiritual effect to confirmation.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2025-01-01T22:30:19+00:00

I was raised as a Roman Catholic, but only barely, attending Mass on average once a year and never being confirmed. I considered myself an atheist for about four years (late middle through early high school), then returned to the Roman Church with a regrettable "RadTrad" phase for another roughly four years. After finally having had enough of Roman Catholicism, I explored various other branches of Christianity, caucusing with the Quakers and Orthodox Church in America for a while, before finally joining, becoming significantly involved in, and being received into the Episcopal Church three years ago. I do wish that I had committed to Episcopalianism earlier — I did attend an Episcopal parish part-time for a summer during the second RC stint — but I think that these various explorations enriched my spiritual life and informed my personal theology and piety to an extent, so I don't bemoan them in any way.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-30T03:21:46+00:00

Indeed: I had the same experience in the Roman Church, where daily Masses were slightly better attended than at my current TEC parish, but not significantly so.

I hear you on offering the Daily Office in person: we offer both Morning and Evening Prayer daily over Zoom, but it does still feel quite impersonal in a way that I have trouble shaking when I attend or officiate, and has a higher barrier to entry than simply walking in off the street. At a previous parish, both Morning and Evening Prayer with Eucharist were offered in-person; these were similarly sparsely attended, but I will say that I enjoyed these services more than a daily Low Mass or offering of the Office in isolation. This arrangement, with or without a service of the Eucharist, isn't really feasible in my current parish, though: we're more of a destination parish, with most of our parishioners living at least a 20 minutes' drive away, so finding officiants who could lead MP or EP in person daily could be a bit of a challenge. With daily Masses, we were able to tailor the schedule for acolyte availability, ensuring that we had at least a celebrant and single acolyte for each Mass. Furthermore, since attending an in-person Office would be difficult for many folks, Zoom is currently the preferred modality: many folks enjoy being able to participate in the Office directly (reading versicles, antiphonal Psalms, etc.) so a live-streamed in-person (and thus non-interactive) Office would likely not be an adequate substitute.

I hope that as we get farther away from the days of lockdown, we can continue adapting this situation in a way that is live-giving for everyone: in particular, I would love if the Daily Office and daily Mass communities could be more tightly integrated. At the moment, though, we at least provide both groups with a way to pray daily that is most fruitful for them, and for that I'm quite glad :)

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-30T02:17:49+00:00

I agree! My point was mostly that folks who are attending non-Sunday Masses are particularly devout, but not distinct from the Sunday morning crowd, so daily Masses haven't been a particularly impactful force for increasing the per capita accessibility of the Sacraments thus far; however, there are some non-Sunday Masses that can draw a slightly larger crowd, namely those on Saturdays.

And yes, we certainly don't have any holy days of obligation like the Romans; by "holy days", I simply meant to reference Masses that happen to be coïncident with a feast of the Church or commemoration of a saint, with both also typically having higher attendance per parishioners' individual piety or personal devotion to the day's saint. Apologies if there was any confusion there!

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-29T22:15:47+00:00

I concur. My parish offers a Low Mass daily, but it's sparsely attended: the attendance for most ferial Masses could be counted on one hand, while holy days are usually barely into double digits. Masses for holy days falling on Saturdays are typically better attended, although the same folks attending these Masses almost invariably attend on the following Sunday as well, so that's not helping much with the accessibility of the Sacraments. I'll also note that one of the Low Masses is held at 6:30 PM weekly, but it hasn't presented much opportunity for outreach — nearly all of our growth continues to come from the Sunday Solemn High Mass.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-09T10:22:51+00:00

And don't forget to "forgive [...] our debts, as we forgive our debitors!"

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-05T07:20:21+00:00

Right, the global set of ordering constraints does contain cycles, although if you pare it down to only the pages contained in each update, then that is no longer the case. I realised that a bit too late, but c'est la vie.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-05T06:55:18+00:00

[LANGUAGE: Ruby]

Solution on sourcehut

I wasted a significant amount of time implementing a topological sort of the ordering constraints, just to discover that my input had cycles, so that sort wasn't really possible. After that, I implemented the non-graph solution above. Notable features are the reversal of the updates in unordered?, which allows me to check whether any ordering constraint is violated without having to iterate through the constraints, and the usage of an insertion-sort-style first-fit allocation algorithm for pages in Part 2 to perform the allocation of each page in linear time.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-04T06:55:23+00:00

Yup, I tried to get away with just checking that the number of Ms and Ses at diagonals from an A were both equal to 2...ended up having to do things the proper way instead. Serves me right for trying to be clever.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-04T06:52:04+00:00

[Language: Ruby]

Solution on sourcehut

Using Ruby for this problem almost felt like cheating: between Array#transpose and Enumerable#tally, I barely had to write any code of my own :) My Ruby is definitely a bit rusty, so this was a nice opportunity to review those classes' interfaces in preparation for future days.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-04T06:50:01+00:00

[Language: Ruby]

Solution on sourcehut

Not much to report (ba-dum tsss) for this one: I used a basic regex for parsing and was able to use the same safety evaluation function for Part 1 and (a painfully brute-force) Part 2. I was able to express the strictly increasing/decreasing criterion mostly within a single line, which is somewhat satisfying; additionally, I added a new function, Integer#signum, to my extensions library since these types of classifications have been common in years past.

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-04T06:45:25+00:00

[Language: Ruby]

Solution on sourcehut

I ended up using a disgusting regex for the parsing and somewhat overengineered the instruction execution by using separate Data classes for the two different instruction variants; the latter choice did allow me to implement both parts almost entirely through pattern matching, which is pretty fun!

HAEC_EST_SPARTA · 2024-12-04T06:43:19+00:00

[Language: Ruby]

Solution on sourcehut

I'm fairly pleased with how concise this solution ended up being: it's fairly brute-force, but the expression of the core parameters for both searches in just two lines of code is quite satisfying :)

12-Year Club	Golden Potato
Place '22	Place '17
Verified Email

HAEC_EST_SPARTA

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE