Mass
for the Fifth Sunday in Lent, Sunday 17 March 2013, 7.30pm
Celebrant:
Rev Jeremy Milne (by process of elimination, see below)
It
wasn’t a good start to a Sunday. Having stayed up too late the night before,
poor little Soul Searcher just couldn’t get her lazy bones out of bed for a
morning service. Luckily, St Mary’s holds five masses every Sunday, three times
in English and twice in Polish, so I had no excuse not to go to one of them.
I’d
decided on a Catholic church this week because of the papal election, but the
cathedral wasn’t exactly buzzing with excitement about the new pontiff. They
were still reeling from Cardinal O’Brien’s resignation, of course, as was acknowledged
in Fr Milne’s homily: “What a Lenten journey this is proving to be for us.”
At
least, I’m assuming it was Fr Milne. The newsletter listed four clergy, two of
them Polish, and since the priest officiating referred to “what Fr Michael has
written in the newsletter”, he could not himself have been Fr Michael, nor did
he have a Polish accent. Ergo, he must have been Jeremy Milne … I think.
The
gospel reading was John 8:11, the woman caught in adultery, so the theme of the
sermon was forgiveness, which “helps to propel us beyond the obstacle of our
resentment, anger and bitterness towards the future”, a timely reflection for a
congregation that has been “forced to examine how we deal with forgiveness” in recent
weeks.
The
singing was the worst I’ve heard anywhere so far in my mission. It was impossible to tell
whether anyone in the scattered congregation was singing at all, but one grotesquely
over-amplified female voice shrieked from the public address system, over a
florid Richard Clayderman-style piano accompaniment. There is an organ, and
there is an organist, but on this occasion it was just piano and caterwauling.
I couldn’t see where the singer was, having sat too far forward, but when I did
locate the source of the noise I realised there were four singers, not one.
Either there’s a problem with the microphones or they have three silent
choristers.
According
to the newsletter, the choir (which sings at the mid-morning service) and the
music group (which was what I was listening to) are both looking for new
members, if anyone feels like rushing to their rescue. To be fair to the one
shrill treble, without her efforts there would have been no singing at all.
The
hymns, from Liturgical Hymns Old & New,
were all entirely unknown to me and all in the same
not-really-with-it-but-trying-very-hard-to-be-contemporary genre. There was a sentimental
hymn to St Patrick, it being his feast day, which wouldn’t have sounded out of
place on a Daniel O’Donnell album, three other hymns, a responsorial psalm of
sorts, and something sung to the Londonderry Air which wasn’t announced or
listed on the hymn board and whose lyrics were lost to poor diction. And as for
that famous top note … close but no cigar!
I took
the opportunity to look up in Liturgical
Hymns Old & New the hymn that had troubled me so much at St Margaret's and St Leonard's. Sure enough, the lyrics have been revised; Nostra Aetate has achieved something.
But on
the whole it wasn’t a scintillating experience. Maybe everyone else was as
tired as I was, and maybe the morning services are a riot, but this one was
frankly pretty boring. Perhaps they’ll perk up a bit after their Lenten penance
is served and they’ve recovered from their recent traumas.
I went to University with Jeremy when he studied ecology. He's a nice guy, quite serious, earnest and all round good egg but I don't think he's one to inspire the masses. Given what we now know about organized faith, one needs a good sense of humor (and humility) to hold an audience's attention.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if you are punning on the word "masses". I suspect I didn't see St Mary's at its best - last mass of a long day, cold and dark outside, everyone just wanting to go home, and the clergy working overtime to cover for the absent cardinal. Maybe things have picked up by now; it's six months since. I hope so. If they're just slaving away every day in a mass factory, going through the motions, it can't be much fun for anyone.
ReplyDeleteIt was (perhaps) unfair to single out Jeremy in the wider point I was trying to make. But in the wake of Cardinal Keith O’Brien’s misdemeanors (and the history of abuse in all organized faiths, not just Catholicism), it seems wholly inadequate for church leaders to don the cloth, refer to parables of forgiveness and then head home for a cup of tea...
ReplyDeleteFor all we know, Fr Jeremy may have spent all night kneeling on a stone floor and flagellating himself. Maybe he gave up tea for Lent.
ReplyDeleteBut your point is sound. The church is a machine that just keeps on grinding no matter what scandal is brewing or has just broken. I left St Mary's that evening with no real sense of how anyone, lay or clergy, felt about the old cardinal or the new pope or what it all meant for them.