October 2008

Stir Up Sunday

Randal Henly

The Sunday next before Advent, or as it is now designated, ‘the fifth Sunday before Christmas’ (this year it falls on 23 November) is known colloquially as ‘Stir Up Sunday’. How many, I wonder, know why? Ardent readers of Agatha Christie’s thrillers should certain be able to give the reason, because in ‘The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding’, Stir Up Sunday is mentioned, and the cook in the Lacey household tells all about it to Hercule Poirot, who of course solves the problem of the story.

Stir Up Sunday is so called because of the collect of the day, which begins: ‘Stir up, O Lord, the wills of your faithful people .....’. The week following this Sunday is, according to the Lacey cook anyway, the time when traditionally the Christmas puddings are stirred up. In the novel referred to, Poirot is spending an old-fashioned Christmas at the King’s Lacey Manor, when some of the younger generation in the house party decide to play a trick on him. But Poirot naturally retains the upper hand throughout and devises a counter trick — unknown to them of course.

Agatha Christie was no doubt a practising Anglican, for there are references in many of her novels to other ecclesiastical matters, e.g., evensong, the vicar and vicarage, choir boys, the Mothers’ Union, the vestry and the churchwardens.
The full text of the collect for Stir Up Sunday runs:

Stir up O Lord the wills of your faithful people:
that richly bearing the fruit of good works,
they may by you be richly rewarded;
through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

But I much prefer the version I grew up with, and which I know best, i.e., the version without the modernised wording, which runs:

Stir up we beseech thee O Lord,
the wills of thy faithful people;
that they, plenteously bring forth the fruit of good works,
may of thee be plenteously rewarded;
through jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

<<Previous | Next >>