Masses Today

11.00 Bridie & Ted Smyth, (Anniv)
6.30 Martin & Kate Cleary, (Anniv)





Events This Week and Last






AS I WAS SAYING...

Easter (in which I include Holy Week) was never a popular festival. The old Holy Week liturgies were celebrated early in the morning on Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Sparsely attended, they were little understood or appreciated. As far as the people were concerned, the Easter Triduum was a non-runner. It was far too complex and best left to the experts!

The general public found ceremonial high points elsewhere: Tenebrae, at which 15 candles were extinguished gradually as Psalms and Lamentations were sung; the three hours of sermons on Good Friday afternoon; further sermons that night on the Seven Last Words of Jesus. There was no Easter Vigil as we understand it today. Mass was celebrated on Easter Sunday morning and it was almost an anti-climax, bringing life back to normal again. It is not today or yesterday that the people began to absent themselves from the Easter Ceremonies.

Right from the beginning, there has been a strong ambiguity surrounding the Holy Week-Easter event. The early Christians tended to gloss over the death of Jesus. He had been executed as a criminal, and this was an embarrassment. St. Paul said as much, referring to the cross as 'a scandal'. The cross, without a corpus, was the earliest Christian symbol. But Christian writers from the 2nd century through the 12th do not dwell upon the Passion. None of the early Church Fathers has a treatise on the sufferings of Christ, nor do we have from them any notable homilies on the topic. With the Cistercians of the 12th century came a great flowering of Christian literature. And the image of Christ on the cross begins to appear for the first time. But he is pictured as reigning divinely, not hanging in agony.

The 13th century saw an enormous cultural shift, with a new focus on the humanity of Christ. This was one precondition for a growing focus on the Passion. The other was probably the Black Death. This is the world of Francis Assisi, the first stigmatist. During the next two centuries the focus of Christian devotion falls intensely on the Passion, with ever more attention paid to Christ's physical sufferings. Yet that great pictorial representation of the history of Salvation from Creation to the Final Judgement, the Sistine Chapel, contains no scene from the Passion and no panel depicting the Crucifixion.

However, throughout northern Europe, Passion Plays become popular, and the Stations of the Cross are introduced. The Stations ended with the placing of Christ in the tomb. And the Christian is invited to follow with devotion 'the Man of Sorrows'. (I presume Mel Gibson's film belongs to this 'school of suffering'.) A feature common to all these practices was the neglect of the Resurrection.

The reform of the Easter Liturgy was an attempt to redress this balance, to restore the Resurrection to the centre of Christian liturgy. The 'new' emphasis falls on our dignity in Christ, and a less pessimistic assessment of our role 'here below'.

Nevertheless, Easter attempts to engage us with raw reality: death and the hope of resurrection. Christmas, on the other hand, is popular precisely because it avoids reality by suspending it for a few days! Consequently, Easter never had, and never will have, the same popular appeal.

-Dick Lyng.




CYRENE

Nothing is given. Only the long delay
of affliction between now
and what is still to be. And yet -

I was following uneven paths along the way
where crowds were gathering, shiftily;
I stepped out of the sun into his
shadow; of all those loitering why was it I who was chosen?

I hauled the rude beam for him where it weighed
mightily on my shoulder-blades and neck;
if I had wings it would have broken them
but I kept silent, swallowed down my loathing
while he walked ahead, indifferent,
suffering his own indignities.

Sometimes now when I achieve a stillness,
dusk, perhaps, smoke rising like a tree,
or noon, a cock still languidly crowing
at the sunlit limit of the village,
someone that looks like him will disappear
suddenly round the angle of a house
as if he had ever actually appeared -
the one on whom the cross of rumour has been laid
and I feel shaken utterly

that we walk clamorously between silences
and have learned little of the scandal of the flesh.

-John F. Deane.





EASTER FAITH TODAY

At my most pious, aged about 12, I loved Lent. We were not a daily Mass-going house, but I cycled alone to Mass before breakfast every morning. Out in the spring sunshine, fasting, I discovered a virtuous high. The ceremonies of Holy Week were as much a sensory as a spiritual experience: statues cowled in purple cloths, dust motes circling in the shafts of sunshine, a sense of warmth returning.

The great Christian feasts fit by intent with the cycles of nature. Easter's themes of death and resurrection find harmony with nesting birds, spring lambs and Easter eggs. There is even a consoling paradox in celebrating Christ's birth at the dying time of the year and his death at the time of birth.

When the majority of Irish society wore ashes on Ash Wednesday, joined in the Holy Week ceremonies and believed in the resurrection, I wonder whether we were on better terms with death than we are now.

Now my post-Vatican 11 generation expresses spirituality in diverse ways. Few indeed orthodox in a way our grandparents' generation would have understood. For all the talk of growing materialism, I doubt many of us live utterly unexamined lives. Our personal compromises can be challenged when we seek schools for our children in the denominational education system but, in a very Irish way, within that system we co-exist. What happens, though, when we are really tested?

My grand-uncle came to last December's Christmas dinner. He became gravely ill and died. Dear, legendary, courageous, controversial, tough as nails and with a faith like granite, that was my 94-year-old uncle Aedan McGrath. He had been a Columban missionary for most of his life, had been imprisoned in China in the 1950s and was active to the end. One of three of my grandfather's brothers who joined the Columbans, he came from an Irish generation which believed fervently in the rightness of Catholicism and an imperative to convert the world.

Not for him the liberation theology embraced by later Columbans: he enlisted the laity through the Legion of Mary. On the day of his death, four generations spanning 90 years briefly shared our house. In those 11 people, I imagine there was as wide a spectrum of belief and unbelief as you would find in any Irish house on Christmas Day. We were united in love, in shock, and from the youngest to the oldest, in facing our mortality. The children's persistent questions were most unnerving. So it was that, in the Columban College near Navan with the snow falling outside, we visited my uncle lying in the Chinese parlour between cabinets housing carvings in ivory. From the children's point of view, seeing uncle's body was I worth a thousand adult 'answers' . His supportive and sensitive community offered crisps and Coke with the tea in an adjoining room.

Without the certainties of earlier generations, we may fear to admit that we do not know all the answers. But most of us are sustained in the face of our mortality by personal beliefs, however evolving, however seldom articulated. Questioned by grieving children, we owe them and ourselves the courage to confront death and find a way to express and pass on the beliefs which keep us alive. (Irish Times, Easter Saturday, 2001)

-Maev-Ann Wren is a journalist with The Irish Times.





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