Cathedral Blues
Being away from home last weekend, I attended Mass at one of the Cathedrals in southern England. Sadly I found it full of all my favourite bugbears. The congregation appeared to believe that their mission in life was to chatter with each other before the start of Mass, which they did with a volume of noise and abandon which I have rarely come across in any church - even a priest was chattering away at one side with a group of young people. The majority of the congregation were dressed for a day out beside the sea. The music consisted of the finalists in the Competion for the Most Banal Catholic Hymn. The sound system was terrible to a degree that only Catholic churches seem to be able to achieve. The celebrating priest improvised weird gestures throughout which made him seem more like a druid than a Catholic priest.
The only good thing about the way the Mass was conducted was the homily, which was by a visiting Italian priest from an African mission. Although his English was good, I had great difficulty making out what he was saying because of the terrible sound system. What I did manage to hear was very interesting, but he only spoke for about eight minutes. I learned afterwards that he had spoken for longer at an earlier Mass but had been told to keep it shorter!
Yet this turned out to be a wonderfully positive experience. I had a sudden realisation that what the Lord wanted of me was to give him all the negative thoughts I was having. If I offered them to him as they came to me, he would transform the dross into gold - there was a sense, more than a sense, that bringing my imperfect experience of the imperfect world to him would redeem the situation. He wanted me neither to deny my feelings nor to hold on to them. He wanted me to bring the whole of what I was experiencing to him as I experienced it.
Si Fractus Fortis
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Reader Comments (1)
One of the things I get to give to the Lord every Mass is the way many people reach for your hand to hold hands during the Our Father. I don't like it. I don't buy the bonding thing and I don't see it in the rubric of the Mass.
We visited a church while visiting my mom and the visiting celebrant said, "My record is 34 minutes in and out the door. We'll see what we can do today." I found his pride over this embarrassing.