Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Holy Week Coming Up

What is it about Palm Sunday that makes it such a wonderful day?

I suppose I could go on and on about the beauty of the liturgy for that day (yes, even the 1955 Bugnini liturgy), how it moves seamlessly from the joy and exultation of the triumphal procession to the pain and sorrow of the Passion narrative. It's true. It is beautiful. Palm Sunday was also my favorite liturgical day long before I knew anything about the Restored Holy Week liturgies.

About ten years ago, I was a Southern Baptist preacher-wannabe who played trombone in the high school band. One year, right around Easter, I was invited to take my trombone and play a fanfare with a local ensemble for Palm Sunday at the local Lutheran congregation (ELCA). Turns out, the bishop was visiting and the pastor wanted to put on a special show for him.

There were a few things about this service that made it different from anything I had experienced before. First, this church had a female pastor, my former piano teacher, in fact, and I strongly believed, along with most Baptists, that women had no place in ordained ministry. (I still do believe this.) Second, it was a themed service, exclusively dedicated to commemorating the Entry into Jerusalem. Usually Baptist services were either only incidentally or rarely themed to commemorate an event in the life of our Lord. Even Christmas services might take John 3 as their text. Lastly, it was a liturgical service, with scripted prayers and a eucharistic liturgy, something entirely alien to my experience.

I also hated it. I spent most of the time nervous about what was supposed to be going on, much of the time trying to find my place, and the rest of the time reflecting on how dead it all seemed.

Fast-forward one year. In the space of that year, I had taken up various Catholic devotions, studied up on the history of Christian worship, become a raging theological liberal, ands been deemed the most promising young heretic in the local Baptist Association. I decided that year to give the Lutheran service a second chance, especially on a day like Palm Sunday which I had attended before. I went back, and this time found myself transported by the beautiful words of the Lutheran service--well, I thought them beautiful at the time--and happy to have actually spent the day meditating on a single mystery in the life of our Lord. I decided to keep with the Lutheran church and ended up going to all the Holy Week liturgies and eventually becoming a member of that congregation.

I only had one year of being a Lutheran. My next Palm Sunday was in a traditionalist Roman Catholic community with which I worshipped, on my way to joining the Catholic Church through the RCIA process the following year. There was a visiting priest and seminarian, as I recall, which allowed Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the other services to be Solemn Liturgies. I went to the Novus Ordo Easter Vigil to see a friend of mine brought into the Church. The next year's Palm Sunday service was at a regular parish church (Ordinary Form), the last week I would be officially a Protestant.

So, my conversion process has been a series of Palm Sundays, from congregation to congregation and rite to rite until at last at home in the bosom of the Church.

I think, after all, Palm Sunday is a good liturgy for traddies to reflect on, especially in these post-Summorum Pontificum days. Like the people of Jerusalem, think of how we applauded the freedom given to the traditional mass, it's incorporation into the normal life of the Church, the reconciliation of so many traditionalists to the Catholic Church under Pope Benedict XVI. But think about the conclusion of the Palm Sunday liturgy. It only took one week, and the people that greeted our Lord as King would later crucify him for the very same cause. "Son of David" at the beginning of the week was a blessing; "King of the Jews" would later be a curse.

Even so, I often worry that, even as the Church has been given the freedom to experience and share the traditional Mass, the world around us is becoming even more hostile to the Catholic faith. The Mass of the Saints is on the verge of becoming the "Mass of Martyrs". Perhaps we have been given the full recognition of the Church just soon enough to sacrifice our lives for Her. Otherwise, we might have been left out.

To me, this demands that we be even more zealous in defending not so much the traditional Mass or traditionalist practices--the Church does that for us--but rather our Holy Father, the reputation of our fellow Catholics, even when we disagree with them on this or that point, and the witness of the Church in social matters. We MUST do this, or we will go from being the women at the foot of the cross to the women whom Jesus met on the way.

Just my two cents.

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