Sometimes it’s as if we don’t expect the Church’s liturgy to be engaging and transformative
It just isn’t possible to get modern people’s ‘secular’ calendars to line up with the Church’s calendar. For example, in the liturgy it’s Advent right up until the morning of Christmas Eve. Yet most people have been shopping, partying, and Christmas-carolling for over a month at that stage. For most people, the phrase ‘Christmas season’ means the weeks leading up to Christmas Day.
It’s not for nothing that the peculiar Irish greeting of “How did you get over the Christmas?” is heard from St Stephen’s Day onwards. We can wag our fingers and tut disapprovingly, but it won’t make a blind bit of difference. Making a point by singing Christmas carols right up until the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord may make liturgical purists feel virtuous, but we might as well be whistling in the wind.
It’s the same at Easter. The Church has a whole Octave of solemnity and extends the season for 50 days until Pentecost. Yet, for most people, Easter is over once they return to work on Easter Tuesday, or, for families with children, once the schools re-open the following week.
Living in a monastery, where every single antiphon and response we sing has an extra ‘Alleluia’ added to it throughout the season, it’s not hard to be aware that it’s still Easter. But for most people, Easter came and went several weeks ago.
Even regular worshippers are frequently out of sync with the Church’s year and its ways of celebrating it. I could moan about this. I could wail about secularism. I could lament people’s shallow understanding of the Church’s year and liturgy.
Dawn Mass
I could complain about the quality of much liturgical celebration, music and preaching. I really could do all of these things. And if the truth be known, I frequently do! (In like-minded company, of course.) But that kind of moaning doesn’t get us very far.
I’m struck particularly by the phenomenon of the Dawn Mass, which is becoming ever more popular in Ireland. On Easter Sunday morning, all around the country, people and priests gathered on mountains, at holy wells, at early Christian sites and similar places of local resonance to celebrate the Eucharist as dawn was breaking. Who was there? Some were pillars of their parishes. Some were people who rarely come to church, but whose spiritual imagination was piqued by the idea – the people on the peripheries to whom Pope Francis encourages us to reach out.
What took place? In many places they would have gathered around a fire and blessed it. Local musicians might have played while they gathered. They may even have danced a few figures of a set.
They listened to God’s word, culminating in the powerful story of the Resurrection. They blessed water and renewed their baptismal promises. They celebrated the Eucharist.
And they probably finished off with a communal breakfast. In short: they celebrated a form of Easter Vigil.
Some liberties might have been taken with the rubrics and the priest might have had an anorak on over his minimal vestments, but it was a vigil nonetheless.
Despite this, in all the parishes where these festive, life-giving and earthy sunrise celebrations took place, an Easter Vigil (or two, or three) took place earlier on Saturday night.
While it’s great that people who aren’t normally in church participate in the outdoor Dawn Mass, is it really a good idea to be having different celebrations of the ‘truly blessed night, when things of Heaven are wed to those of earth’? Isn’t it odd that a parish would celebrate the ‘official’ Easter Vigil before sunset and then go up a mountain to keep vigil for the light again a few hours later?
Perverse
Isn’t it downright perverse to have a tiny fire in a biscuit tin in the church porch with only the priest and servers around it at the ‘official’ Easter Vigil, but to have everyone gathered around a wonderful bonfire at the Dawn Mass? Is the ‘official’ vigil an experience of passing over from darkness to light? Is any obvious link made between the ‘official’ Easter Vigil and the Dawn Mass? Would the Heavens fall down if we had food and a party after the ‘official’ Easter Vigil too?
It’s as if we don’t expect the Church’s liturgy to be powerful, engaging and transformative. Or that we don’t believe it can be… it can!
People don’t come to a Dawn Mass because it is quick, easy or convenient. A Dawn Mass isn’t any of those things. It involves effort, loss of sleep and braving our unreliable climate. They come because it means something to them. How can we bridge the gap between that meaningful experience and what we do inside the walls of our churches?
Martin Browne is a monk of Glenstal Abbey. @MartinBrowne OSB