Weekly message – Sunday 3 May
Dear friends,
[In fact Magdalen College Choir recorded a Virtual May Morning so maintaining the 500-year-old tradition.] When looking at May Day for Time Together last year I went off at a tangent, and found out that the Mayday distress call (‘Mayday, mayday, mayday’) originated in Croydon. As Croydon was a pioneering airport, they needed a word that would indicate distress, and be easily and unmistakably understood by pilots and ground staff in a time of emergency. A senior radio officer, Frederick Mockford came up with Mayday as most of the air traffic was between Croydon and France, and Mayday is like the French for ‘help me’ – m’aider. It was then adopted as an international radiotelephone distress call. (Incidentally, this is not why the Croydon hospital was called Mayday – that was named earlier from the road it was originally sited in – though, who knows, familiarity with that road might have sparked a subconscious train of thought.) M’aider (help me) is a consistent cry in the Psalms, which are appropriate reading at the moment! You do not have to venture far into the Psalms to find the phrase ‘help me’. Here are a very few:
If you are looking for something to do in the current lockdown, why not research the Psalms and find how many references there are to a cry to m’aider? But remember such Psalms come with verses that offer reassurance too! As in Psalm 121:
Every blessing for this beginning to May. Next message: Sunday 10 May |