Our parish had their Holy Thursday Mass last night. We had Communion under both kinds for the first time since 2019. We had done it seldom prior to that; only on Holy Thursday and for weddings (just the bride and groom). And then 2020 was Covid, which continued into 2021 and beyond. I think it was a good Mass, I was one of the EMHCs for the cup, which always makes me nervous, because I am afraid I will spill the Precious Blood. But I didn't. The priest encouraged everyone who wanted to, to receive from the cup, and more than half of them did. I heard a lot of positive comments. Maybe now we can do it more often. The other two parishes in town have it at least once a month. Supposedly we're all under the same management now.
Holy Thursday is a not a holy day of obligation, but the church was pretty much full. The people in attendance were there because they wanted to be, which is a good sign. It was solemn but also joyful. We had incense, which I like, but it was way too much, the Cloud of Unknowing. Yes, you can overdo a good thing.
Today is Good Friday, which I always have trouble getting a proper attitude for. I guess finding it uncomfortable and disturbing is the way it's supposed to be. But I'm always glad when it's over.
Simcha Fisher had a good piece on the America site, "Small ways to make your Triduum better": Small ways to make your Triduum better – SIMCHA FISHER. She said, "Triduum is a short strange, unsettling time", which I agree.
Some of her suggestions were:
"Don’t denounce anybody. If you spend any time on social media, this one is harder than it might seem. So many people are so ripe for denunciation! But you can just take a pause and remember that all sins, all the ones you detest in other people, and all the ones you excuse in yourself, all are accounted for in the cross. So take a pause, and let the cross account for them, rather than doing it yourself, just for now."
"Quiet down. Just . . . quiet down, everywhere. Quiet your voice, quiet the radio, quiet your music. Take everything down a notch, or turn it off altogether. Opt out of anything optional that’s raucous or frenetic, just for a few days."
"Listen. Make a particular effort to listen to the people around you."
"...Go to bed a little bit earlier. Not everyone can. Lots of people have no choice about how much sleep they get. But many of us, me included, stay up late for no good reason, and it has a bad effect on them and everyone they interact with the next day. In a small act of self-discipline, try sending yourself to bed sooner than you’d like. It’s not self-indulgent. Even Jesus rested over Holy Saturday."
"...Be content with whatever your Lent has been. If you haven’t used your Lent in any especially admirable way, there’s not really any such thing as scrambling to make up for lost time at the last minute. That was never what it was about anyway."
One of the things I did today was to go for a walk, which seemed in keeping. For a change the weather wasn't a harsh cold March day with the wind blowing a gale. It was pleasant and calm, with temperature in the 50s, a mixture of sun and clouds. The sun was behind a thin cloud cover, but you could see where it was. Which seemed kind of appropriate.
We'll have our service tonight, my choir is singing for it . We do all acapella for Good Friday. My husband is doing a short service and Communion at one of the assisted living places this afternoon. The other deacon is doing Stations this afternoon for those who can't make it tonight.
I came across a quote by Mark Shea on Facebook which I thought was good: "The reason the Passion must be observed every year and in every Mass is that homo sapiens insists on making it happen every day. Then he blames God for it...The dysfunction of our species is mind boggling."
Tomorrow is Holy Saturday, a quiet day. The other parish is having the Easter Vigil. The deacons will do the blessing of food in the afternoon, for those who like to participate in that.
This year we are spending Holy Week with the livestreamed services from St. Cecelia in Boston. We have been going there regularly since August at 9:30 am on Sundays. Their livestreamed service has more than 7000 viewers each Sunday from across the country and the world. Of course, in many cases the viewers are multiple person households, so that means probably over ten thousand people watching each Sunday. Most of this is live.
ReplyDeleteThe attraction is a progressive pastor with relevant homilies, an excellent choir of musicians, and a very good audio-visual production with multiple cameras. Their liturgies are as good or better than the performances at the National Shrine with their recording quality choir and production studio provided for EWTN by the Knights of Columbus.
On Holy Thursday they did a communal foot washing similar to what has been done by our local parish for decades now. But not as well. In our parish foot washing, a dozen of our teens have their feet washed by the priests, then become models by washing other people feet and being attendants with towels, basins, water. Saint Cecelia did not have the youth involvement. Foot washing without the dynamism of young people is not nearly as impressive. With the young people you get the impression that Jesus asked us to live differently and they are eager to try it out.
Yesterday, however, Saint Cecilia did the Good Friday Liturgy even better than the very outstanding liturgy done by another local parish or the Shrine Liturgy. For the veneration of the cross they had a life size cross made out of four by fours. It was made the crucifixion into a three-dimensional event rather than a two-dimensional icon. The priest and a very tall and strong young man raised the Cross together at the three points during the procession. In between the priest carried the Cross over his shoulder, not an easy task. At the end of the procession to the altar they placed the cross into a container which was concealed by cloth similar in color to the red vestments of the priest, obviously symbolic of Jesus robe. The cross was put in place by wedges which were hammered into place, resounding in the church.
The veneration began with the ministers and the choir who came two by two to each side of the cross. They touched and embraced the cross in various ways, not much kissing. The parish has both a pieta display of Jesus taken down from the cross, as well as the disciples at the foot of the cross. The camera work projected these as background to the constant changing tableau of people coming from each side of the church to embrace the cross. All was very dramatic because of the size of the cross; one got the impression even from viewing they people were participating in an overwhelming event.
For both the foot washing and the veneration of the Cross, there was silence at the beginning with choir washing each other's feet and venerating the cross before beginning to sing. The long silence in itself was beautiful. It also emphasized that the choir was there to participate with the people in the action, not putting on a separate performance. Only when they had participated in the liturgical action did they then contribute their role. Maybe that is how we should do communion every Sunday!
"Be content" is probably good advice for those of us whose Lent has not been a time of quiet contemplation offering the deepening of faith we'd hoped. Maybe the Easter season will be better.
ReplyDeleteIn that vein, happy Harrowing of Hell Day.
Some of us in my Old English group are doing a group reading of "The Descent into Hell" today. It's here for anybody interested. Quite a good translation and explanation by the blogger. I especially like the character of John the Baptist, who loves Jesus as both brother and lord.
https://aclerkofoxford.blogspot.com/2015/04/open-ws-t-eorrn-harrowing-of-hell.html
I agree re: "be content". Probably good advice for many aspects of life.
DeleteAs one of the humorists in my AlAnon group used to say as a play on the "let go and let God" saying: "Let go or get dragged." If you can't be content and move on, you'll end up blowing your brains out.
DeleteThanks for that link, Jean. I hadn't read that version of the Harrowing of Hell before. Its amazing how the English language has changed over a Millennium. I could barely recognize any words. I would have better luck trying to decipher modern German.
DeleteIt is amazing that English changed that much in less than 200 years. To put it in perspective, we can still read Shakespeare after 400 years, and to a degree we can make out Chaucer, after 700 years. We would probably struggle to understand it as spoken, though. I had no success understanding Beowulf when the instructor played a recording in a college English class. Of course we don't know that the narrator got it right, either.
DeleteI have read that some Saxon is retained in the Scots dialects.
"The Cloud of Unknowing" - very good!
ReplyDeleteWe restored the cup (sorta) within the last year. I say "sorta" because we don't have enough Eucharistic minister volunteers to offer it as liberally as we did prior to COVID. Back then, we had six communion stations, which included six cups. When we restored it recently, we started with two cups, at the stations at the head of the center aisle. But only at those masses which had enough volunteers to offer those two cups - which turned out to be about half the masses each weekend.
I'm using past tense in describing this because, when COVID cases spiked a couple of months ago, the parish staff decided to discontinue the cups, at least for a time. Although, if I'm not mistaken, the CDC recently took some action to "demote" the seriousness of COVID as a public health threat - I think it's now considered more or less another run-of-the-mill virus to look out for.
I think it is meaningful to have Communion from the cup at least occasionally (more than once a year!) so I'm hoping that will happen. Of course I do understand that we're not getting more or less Jesus, whether we receive from the cup or not.
DeleteWe also had a full-ish church for Holy Thursday - I would think as many or more as our best-attended Sunday masses. None of these crowds compare to where our parish was when we joined in the 1990s - in those days, it was common to have virtually every seat taken and people standing in the back and up the side aisles, and finding parking in our capacious parking lot could sometimes be a challenge. Still, it was encouraging to see so many people on Thursday.
ReplyDeleteThe Good Friday wasn't as well-attended - which is the normal pattern at our church. The parish has a big dinner (which we call the agape meal) prior to the Holy Thursday service. Free food always helps pull people in. We don't have that incentive on Good Friday.
Tonight we have nine people receiving various combinations of sacraments of initiation, which is a very large number for us. I think we had one or two last year. For several years before that, we didn't have any. So I see this year as a sign of hope.
We have two people joining; they're already baptized. The only Easter vigil is at the larger parish, which is also where they had RCIA this year. I guess there are about ten people total doing sacraments of initiation.
DeleteIt's funny though, the word getting back to us is that little St. Anthony's has better music than larger St. Bonaventure's. St. Stanislaus down the road is part of our "family of parishes" and they are wanting some help with music because their director is retiring soon. But we are thinking it would be better if someone from there would take up the slack.
Does each of your "family of parishes" have its own pastor?
DeleteFWIW, about 18 months ago, our music director had to step down due to health problems. We hit the jackpot with his replacement - she's really good. She became available because the parish she had been at for 20+ years was merged with a neighoring parish. That is a nightmare scenario for parish staff members, as it results in many "redundancies". In her case, the pastor thought to try to keep both music directors but make them part-time and pay them a per-mass stipend. She needs benefits so she saw our want ad and threw her hat in the ring. Worked out well for her and for us. Hope the "other guy" at her old, merged parish is doing similarly good work.
There is no question of it being a paid position in either of the smaller parishes. I think St. B's may have a paid director. But everyone else are just volunteers. Which lowers expectations and is fine with me. We have no redundancies, the problem is coming up with enough musicians. One thing we are noticing is that that there are very few young people who are taking up keyboarding now.
DeleteTo answer your first question, no, each of the parishes doesn't have a pastor. We have one pastor for three parishes, and a young associate pastor. The main pastor lives in our (St. Anthony's) rectory. We also have three retired priests living in the area. They seem glad to help out with Mass and sacraments sometimes, but they don't do any admin. Nobody likes doing admin.
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