DIOCESAN LITURGICAL COMMISSION NEWSLETTER March 2006 |
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Diocese of Antigonish, 75 Prince Street, P. O. Box 100, Sydney, NS, B1P 6G9
539-6188, extension 222 Fax: 539-7195 liturgy@dioceseofantigonish.ca
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EUCHARIST AS SERVICE
Each year, on Holy Thursday, the members of L’Arche Cape Breton gather in our small wooden chapel for a very special prayer. The seats have been rearranged into semi-circles, one for each house. On the carpeted floor in front of each group of seats, instead of a prayer cloth and a candle, sits a jug of warm water, a basin, and a towel. People stream in to the warm, inviting room from the cold, some walking, some in wheelchairs, some with walkers, and take their places with their housemates. Knowing what is to come, they reach down and take off their shoes and socks. Tonight we celebrate the Washing of the Feet. 
We begin, as always, in song. When the strains of An Upper Room or The Servant Song or The Lord Jesus have faded away, one of our community members comes forward and proclaims the Gospel (John 13:1-17), telling the story of that sacred evening when, after sharing a meal with His friends, Jesus knelt humbly before them and washed their feet. We listen to Peter's resistance of Jesus’shocking act of service, and the authority with which Jesus commands the disciples to follow His example. Then, as the Community Leader, I share some of my reflections about this Gospel passage and what it teaches us about community and about authority. Living in a diverse community such as L’Arche, where we share different cultures, abilities, religions, and languages, there is much that divides us. Sadly, religion is often one of those dividing forces. Many of us have felt alienated, isolated, or judged by religion, particularly by our experience of communion. In this Gospel story of the Last Supper, the breaking of bread tends to be our focus. But why not focus on the washing of the feet? Why not remember this act of love, where Jesus instructs us not just to eat together, but to take care of one another. Touch one another, wash one another, love one another. And this is true no matter our ability or disability, our race or religion or creed. We must take care of each other. This is our call.
The image of Jesus as a servant leader is also a very compelling one. Jesus, the Son of God, the Almighty, kneeling in front of his disciples, touching the dirtiest, most reviled part of their bodies, their feet. How do we reconcile this with our image of leaders today – people of power, privilege, and control, here not to serve but to be served? Jesus calls us to a new kind of authority, authority at the heart of a community, exercised with love and vulnerability and humble service. This seems impossible, just as it is impossible to forgive seventy times seven times, or to love our enemies, or to give all our possessions to the poor. And yet, this too is our call.
In this spirit of humble service, I invite the Houseleader of each of our six houses to come forward and sit in the circle with me. Following Jesus’ example, I kneel in front of each of them and gently wash their feet, pouring the warm water over their bare feet, rubbing gently with my hands, and then drying them with the towel. As I wash each of their feet, they reach down, lay their hands on my head or my shoulders, and pray a blessing over me. Then they return to their housemates and wash the feet of the first person in their circle. They, too, receive a blessing from the person whose feet they have washed, and then that person kneels in front of the next one in the circle, washes their feet, and is blessed. This continues until each person has washed and been washed, blessed and been blessed. We then pray the Lord’s Prayer together, and end our evening with a song.
Each year, at the Washing of the Feet, our community hears again the call of Jesus to love and serve one another, and together we say yes to this radical vocation.
Jen Power
L’Arche Community
EUCHARIST AS SUFFERING
On Good Friday, the Church reads the full passion narrative of Our Lord Jesus Christ. The death and resurrection of Jesus are undisputedly the oldest components of the Christian tradition to be handed down. The early Church correctly identified and considered them the central events of the life of Jesus. Though Mark’s gospel was the first to be written, it is not the earliest account of the passion in the New Testament; that honor goes to St. Paul who speaks so eloquently of these events and their meaning in his epistles. To be a Christian is to believe in the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and to make constant efforts to embrace the paschal mystery in the experiences of our daily lives, in our communities, and in the world. 
Good Friday focuses on the passion and death of Jesus, a day of grief and sadness, of pain and lost hopes. I have worked for over 30 years in mental, general and children’s hospitals and this immersion into suffering has pushed me to engage this mystery as I attempt to minister to persons burdened by loss, meaninglessness and death.Several centuries before Jesus, the Greek author Aeschylus in Agamemnon writes these words: The one who learns must suffer. And even in our sleep pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop on the heart, and in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God”. This quote speaks of the burden of awareness, (if we become aware, we cannot become unaware), and how awareness increases our suffering. It also tells us that potentially from suffering also comes wisdom and grace that can lead us to God. We also know that suffering can overwhelm and crush us, it can crush our faith in its wake, or so it feels, especially if we risk suffering alone, without the support, love and care of others or a community.
In John 12:20-33, Jesus ponders his inevitable suffering. The inescapable fact of human suffering is considered to be a hindrance to faith. The child asks, if there is a God, why is there so much suffering in the world?” And adults ask, why do innocent children suffer?” Today, more than in any time of history, and particularly in the West, there is such a strong intellectual challenge to religious faith on the grounds of the depth and extent of human suffering. Many of us are more aware of our own pain and TV and instantaneous news coverage brings the suffering of the world into our awareness on a daily basis. We are more aware now than ever of the sheer weight of suffering that human beings can perpetrate on other humans. In the hospital, people often try to deal with suffering intellectually, by denial or by rationalization. But this does not work for long, for suffering hits us mostly where it hurts, in our feelings. We shout out why”, which is not an intellectual questioning, but rather a cry of anguish, similar to Jesus’ cry of anguish in Gethsemane. However, after the calm that may come from releasing our feelings, the intellectual question of "suffering" remains. I believe the intellectual question persists because we automatically pin responsibility for suffering on God, who ultimately is responsible for everything. After all, many of us were taught that it is God’s will that we suffer, and so we use the phrase It is God’s will” to close down all reflection and wrestling with this question. And from this people derive a theology of a God who sends them sickness and pain to test, purify and punish them for their sins, which leaves them with an image of God that is arbitrary and cruel, and quite in opposition to the image of God presented by Jesus in the Scriptures.
So when people ask me, why suffering, (one of the oldest human questions), I reply often that there is a mystery of good and a mystery of evil, and we must embrace both in order to enter fully into the paschal mystery. It seems that we must make a distinction between a problem and a mystery. A problem is an issue that is outside me, a matter over against which I stand, and to which I can discover a solution. A mystery is an issue in which I am personally involved, from which I cannot really disentangle myself, and to which I can find no objective solution, but only a living solution. I cannot solve a mystery; I can only live with it. So there is no solution to the problem of suffering, but there is a comprehension of the mystery of suffering. Suffering in not a problem, it is a mystery. This means that we are immersed in this mystery by our very human existence. This also means there is no complete answer to all the questions we can raise.
However, there is a way of living out the answers to the questions in which we are involved. If we ask why” we suffer, we will find no answer. If we ask how we may suffer with dignity and remain whole, we will find an answer in our Christian faith, in the passion of Jesus Christ. If you wish to understand the relation of God to our suffering, you must begin at the cross of Jesus Christ. If you take seriously the claim of the cross, you are confronted by a striking affirmation – God suffers too – suffering is part of the experience of God. God is involved in this mystery, rather than a suffering that he inflicts.
As Christians, we make the most incredible assertion, that God has entered history in Jesus Christ. God expressed himself, disclosed his character and purpose; he did in history what we creatures cannot do for ourselves. Jesus’ death is the historical expression of the agony of God. The cross is a sign erected in history of what is eternally true in the life of God.
To share in God’s mystery of life is also to share in this mystery of suffering. The practical question is not why I must suffer. It is rather how does God want me to use this suffering? How can I make the most of it? In all that happens, God can help me learn or grow from it. It can help me make my suffering redemptive. We can attach our suffering to his suffering. We do not find the meaning of suffering in seeking its cause. Rather it is found in an encounter with the Incarnate Word.
On Good Friday, as we reflect on the readings and liturgy set before us in ritual, the Church is inviting us to embrace the paschal mystery in our lives. We must become aware of our own story. We must become aware and be in touch with our own suffering. If we are in touch with our own story and or own suffering, we will have the capacity to be in touch with the story of others, with the suffering of others. If we are bored with the story of others, likely we are out of touch with our own story. Some suffering can harm and even destroy us. Good Friday sets before us a challenge of redemptive suffering, and how we may be fully alive by embracing suffering with disgnity, grace and hope.
Rev. Colin F. MacKinnon
Chaplain
Cape Breton Regional Hospital
EUCHARIST AS RISING
I believe it was the insightful humourist Mark Twain who said:” There’s nothing like a good hanging to concentrate the mind.” The imminence of death concentrates the significance of life. This has been the experience of many family members, medical staff, palliative care workers and clergy who have journeyed with loved ones as they approached the moment of death. And so I call to mind several privileged moments and special people in my ministry. I recall being present as an elderly Alzheimer’s patient died. Her last breath was followed by at least two minutes of total silence, broken when one of her sisters said gently,” Can you just imagine what she is seeing right now?” I call to mind a seven year old child. In the moment after his death, his parents gently held him and repeated the phrase:” Take good care of him Lord, just take good care of him.” And finally, I remember a middle aged man as he was being taken to the ambulance for his last trip to the hospital. He looked at me and said’ “Well, I’m finally ready for this ‘blessed event’. 
We can all tell stories of people of such calm faith. They all express that great paradox of Christianity: we are a people who have faced death and survived it. In the words of St. Paul: you have been taught that when we were baptized in Christ Jesus, we were baptized in his death….we went into the tomb with him and joined him in death.”(Rom.6:3-4). These words speak of a death already experienced; we are already it seems living life after death”. What can this mean? It can mean many things I guess. But in calling to mind these three disciples I was privileged to be with as they went home to God, they all had one thing in common (including the seven year old). Long before the moment of physical death, they had died to what is insignificant in life. They had already died to the pettiness of conflict, to the insane hold that stuff” has on us. They had already died to the slavery of the cog-in-the wheel rat race of our profit driven society. They had already died to the things that cannot last as it is put so succinctly in Scripture.
I have never heard a dying person say,” Oh Lord, if I only had time to work one more shift, to do one more pan of dishes, or to buy one more pair of shoes. In dying to the things that cannot last they had found the meaning of life.
Baptism is a call to discover this newness of life. Each Sunday is a call from God to die to this stuff”, to this driven slavery of production and consumerism. In a culture which equates the quality and fullness of life” with some mythical 10-to-15 year period in our existence when we are physically, economically and sexually at our peak, our faith proclaims that the fullness of life is what we are all heading towards. Fullness of life is what awaits us in the presence of God, whether we die at age two, twenty-two or ninety-two. No one is excluded from this fullness of life—not the poor, the blind the lame, not the leper or the sinner.
What good would life have been to us if Christ had not come as our redeemer? (Exultet). Yes, a good hanging concentrates the mind. And a good Easter Vigil concentrates our baptismal faith and identity. The church knows this. The church has been dealing with these realities for a very long time-long before our present self-indulgent and self absorbed world. The church asks us to celebrate the Vigil well. Let’s do what she asks.
Fr. Bill Burke
Director - Office of Worship
When Will It Be Dark Enough For the Easter Vigil?
The National Bulletin on Liturgy, Vol. 35, Number 171 gives a timetable of Nautical Twilight” (Darkness) on the night of the Easter Vigil for the earliest acceptable time to begin the celebration of the Easter Vigil. This year the earliest acceptable time for the vigil is 9:30 p.m.
Mass of Chrism
The Mass of Chrism will be celebrated at Our Lady of Fatima Church, Sydney River on April 10th at 4 p.m.
Rite of Christian Initiation of Adults (RCIA)
Two institutes are being offered in Canada this year:
1. Focus on Initiation: Concerning the BaptizedThe registration brochure is available at http://www.naforum.org/
May 25-27, 2006 co-hosted by North American Forum and Archdiocese of Moncton, New Brunswick
2. The Initiating Experience: Beginnings & Beyond
July 30 – Aug. 4, 2006 at Newman Theological College, Edmonton, Alberta
Summer Music Institute
A questionnaire has been mailed/faxed to parishes gauging the interest in a 3-day summer music institute, Aug. 28-30, 2006. You may obtain this questionnaire by contacting the Office Of Worship at 539-6188, extension 222. 