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11.40 How I did not attend a great Council
As the heavens turn around the earth, so the time came once more when the summons went out to all the clergy of the known world to attend the International Merovingian Council (of Bishops). I have told you about this great council

2/ earlier in my narrative, for Agiulf and I had journeyed abroad to attend it in the previous year and witnessed many strange things. As before, the summons filled us with great dread at the likelihood that our lack of learning and general unworthiness might be exposed to the

3/ ridicule of wise prelates and, in Agiulf’s case, I am sorry to say, at the prospect of having to do some actual work rather than sitting in the domus ecclesiae eating brioche and playing ‘Vocatio Officii: Bellum Mundi II’ until all hours. Thus we prayed with an earnest heart

4/ to Saint Martin that he might reveal to our dull minds some way of getting out of having to attend this council. Also, to be honest, since the blessed Monegund took up Parkour, someone frequently has to be around to talk the gendarmes round. And lo! In a terrible way our

5/ prayers were answered for the council was cancelled because of the Great Plague. Whereupon we went to the Basilica of the Holy Martin to give thanks to the blessed bishop for this great wonder and yet also to enquire of him if it would not have been possible to grant us our

6/ entreaty via something a bit less drastic. In this way were we both raised up and cast down, which showed us once more the manifest justice of the Lord.
Woe to us for questioning the wisdom of the great bishop! Just as the Lord gives and takes away, the Holy Martin, who had

7/ lifted our spirits with his power, brought them low once more. It was announced that the council would proceed in virtual fashion, using remote synoding software called ‘Apparitio’ which, as ill luck would have it, Agiulf had just signed us up to. With many a tear and groan we

8/implored the saints to visit upon us a temporary internet fault but our merit must have been small for the signal remained bounteous and bandwidth no less so. With much weeping we resigned ourselves to having to attend this council but resolved to keep a low profile lest we

9/ drew down upon ourselves the wrath of any heretics, present, or caught the attention of Bishop Felix of Nantes who even early on had gained notoriety for clogging up the functio garrulationis or ‘chat function’ with his interminable prating. Then my deacon, unworthy though he

10/ is, received the benefit of an enlightening of his mind, something which could only have been the merciful work of Saint Martin. For Agiulf suggested that we could simply put an illumination or icon of ourselves in front of the camera and the assembled clergy would believe us

11/ to be present in various of their learned discussions. Meanwhile we could go to one of the upper rooms of the domus ecclesiae and pretend not to be in if anyone called. We gave thanks for the revelation of this scheme and accordingly laid in supplies from Monop and put

12/ Agiulf’s wise plan into action. It was as well that we did for we heard that many of the virtual gatherings were ‘trolled’, as they say, by fiends unknown. These, indeed, were probably demons although we suspected that Venantius Fortunatus might have been involved for verily

13/ it was the sort of thing that he might get up to especially if he had been drinking.
We all wondered what would become of the strange and wonderful dance which we had observed in the previous year. It was then revealed to us that somehow through the machinations of a king of

14/ the Goths the dance would be held virtually and that all attending clergy would be able to listen to a special radio programme in which all the usual hymns, psalmodic compositions and other banging tunes would be played. Whereupon all would, in the privacy of their own domus,

15/ be able to enact the miraculous cures and punishments wrought by the saints, in the usual way. We could give thanks for this worthy idea, yet we wondered whether there would not somehow be something missing.

16/ So it was that the Great Council came and went in this most strange year of the plague.