Sunday Newsletter

Masses Today

11.00 Bernard & Elizabeth Coyne, (Anniv).
6.30: Sarah & Walter Joyce, (Anniv).

As I Was Saying...

Holy Week and Easter 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 complex matters are 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'. During my homily on Sunday last, I was making the point that we have 'domesticated' the cross. At one time, Christians wore the cross as 'a badge of identity', presumably an act of religious solidarity with the Crucified One. But today the cross is reduced to a fashion accessory, worn as an ear ring, or a necklace. Imagine someone today wearing a set of miniature silver electric chairs as ear rings! Many people would find that highly offensive. One member of the congregation last Sunday took grave exception to this approach: 'That homily did nothing for me at all' said the Offended One. 'You must have pulled it down off the Internet!' We have now come full circle: any attempt to rehabilitate the Cross in human consciousness as the instrument of torture it once was is now the scandal!

The cross, without a corpus, was the earliest Christian symbol. But early Christian writers avoided the Passion. Not until the 12th century do we find the image of Christ on the cross. But he is pictured as reigning divinely, not hanging in agony. The 13th century saw a new interest in the humanity and suffering of Christ, probably stimulated by the Black Death. There is a growing devotion to Christ's physical sufferings, mediated principally through popular Medieval Passion Plays rather than through Church liturgy. His resurrection, however, tended to be ignored. The stress was on this 'valley of tears'.

The reform of the Easter Liturgy in the 1950s and 1960s was an attempt to redress this balance, to restore the Resurrection to the centre of the Christian experience liturgy. The 'new' emphasis falls on our dignity in Christ, and a less pessimistic assessment of our role here below in this 'Vale of Tears'.

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.

Guest Choir

Guest Choir at Augustinian
Sunday Next,
March 30th
At 11.00 Mass.
Woodstock High
School, USA
(And, after Mass some Spirituals, Gospel,
American Folk, Jazz, madrigals).
Make them welcome!

Easter Hope Obscured

Easter is my favourite time, but mainly because it brings a sense of release and relief. I may have caused Christ to be crucified, but somehow He has gotten me off the hook. Whereas Good Friday is unambiguously religious, Easter Sunday in our culture feels more like a secular feast, a celebration of the fact that we have shaken off the guilt and gloom of religion.

A couple of years ago, talking to a Puerto Rican priest with an acute gift for simplicity, I found myself embarrassedly asking if he could explain to me the core meaning of Christianity.

He urged me not to feel bad, since about 95 per cent of Christians do not understand Christianity either. He said that, a short time before, while lecturing in a Catholic seminary in the US, he had been approached by a young man, about to be ordained, who asked him a related but more specific question. He wanted to know the meaning of the Resurrection.

The priest took him to a graveyard and picked a grave at random. The headstone indicated that a man named Daniel was buried there. What, the priest asked the young seminarian, do we know of Daniel?

The young man shrugged. We know, said the priest, that Daniel is dead; that his body is inert, his mind a void; that, even if we were to bring 20 dancing girls and have them cavort around his grave, Daniel would continue to display a radical disinterest in reality.

On the evening of that first Good Friday, he went on, this is how it was with Jesus. But then, 40 hours later, something happened that would change everything. Jesus came back to life. Let us be clear, he emphasised, Jesus began to breathe again, grew warm, started to move, re-engaged with reality, became interested in things around Him. Having been as dead as Daniel, He became, once again, as alive as we are.

This, he told me, is both the meaning of the Resurrection and the central idea of Christianity: that death has no dominion, that beyond the end there is a new beginning. Christianity, he said, is the announcement to the world of the death of death. In 50 years of immersion in a Catholic culture, I never heard it put like that. Although none of the story was new, I had never before quite grasped its meaning. Nobody had ever succeeded in communicating to me that the central message of Christianity is about hope beyond human imagining.

I don't think it's just me. The Christianity we have inherited suggests that the point is to feel bad mostly, but occasionally to celebrate because, though we are unworthy, God is merciful and good.

In its constant reiteration of rules, the Catholic Church has seemed to forget that there is a need to tell people why, rather than out of blind obedience and a perverse desire to be told how to live their lives, they might want to listen to its message. Very often those who are the voices of the Church fail to emphasise the most important part: that once in history, 2,000 years ago, God came to earth as a man to demonstrate that death is a myth born of the limited human imagination.

-John Waters, in The Irish Times, Good Friday, 2008.

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