Monthly Archives: April 2014

Holy Week 2014

23 Wednesday Apr 2014

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Saint John the Evangelist, Calgary

Saint John the Evangelist, Calgary

At the invitation of Father Lee Kenyon, I have just returned from a most remarkable and wonderful Holy Week at Saint John the Evangelist in Calgary, a church of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of Saint Peter. The parish was received into the Church in December 2011 with around 65 persons, and they have received the same number again since then, and attracted a large number of 20-35 year young adult Catholics from the area. Regular Mass attendance is now well over 100. The parish celebrates exclusively according to Divine Worship, the liturgy prepared for the ordinariates, and has a daily celebration of the Mass and the public recitation of Morning and Evening Prayer according to these rites. This includes Mattins sung to plainchant twice a week with homeschooled children who have begun to meet together in the parish to form a cooperative and to form the beginnings of a choir school.

The music at Saint John’s is supported by an amateur parish choir. The English Hymnal and the Canadian equivalent, The Book of Common Praise, supplement the complete propers sung in English to settings from Wantage and the English Gradual. The Ordinary of the Mass is sung to settings by Merbecke and Healey Willan, with great confidence and gusto by all. A good pipe organ assists with this, together with the singing of many the parts of the Mass as prescribed for a said or sung celebration.

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Homily for the Paschal Vigil

20 Sunday Apr 2014

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From a Franz Mayer window in St Mary's Cathedral, Calgary

From a Franz Mayer window in St Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary

Given at the Paschal Vigil at Saint John the Evangelist, Calgary:

Alleluia! Christ our passover is sacrificed for us!
Therefore let us keep the feast! Alleluia! Alleluia!

Over the course of the past week we have travelled with our blessed Lord to the gates of the city of Jerusalem; we have supped with him in the cenacle as he kept the Passover with his disciples; we have stood with his blessed mother at the foot of the cross as he was brutally put to death. Now we come with raw emotion and profound joy to this celebration of new life—of perfected life—in which, through the resurrection of Christ, we are invited to share. Christ has hallowed hell! He has conquered sin! He has put death to death! As we will sing in that victory hymn of the Easter sequence, ‘Death with life contended: combat strangely ended! Life’s own champion, slain, now lives to reign’.

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Homily for Good Friday 2014

18 Friday Apr 2014

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From a Franz Mayer window in St Mary's Cathedral, Calgary

From a Franz Mayer window in St Mary’s Cathedral, Calgary

Given on Good Friday 2014 at Saint John the Evangelist, Calgary

There is perhaps no single day when the Church’s rites and ceremonies speak more profoundly and clearly of the faith she professes, than this. In every solemn gesture and action, she expresses in ritual form today the very essence of her life in a sacramental way: an exterior sign of an interior reality. The purpose of the sacred liturgy is never to teach the Christian faithful, but to shape them by their participation in the very life of the Blessed Trinity. By the worship that we offer here we are formed and conformed in a physical way to the via crucis, the way of the cross, along which we tentatively tread. We are united to the passion of Our Lord so intimately and so completely, that we share in his sufferings in a more than merely figurative way.

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Homily for Palm Sunday

14 Monday Apr 2014

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Processional cross and palms in Saint Matthew's cathedral, Washington, D.C.

Processional cross and palms in Saint Matthew’s cathedral, Washington, D.C.

This homily was given at a Solemn Mass at the church of Saint Mary, Mother of God, in Chinatown, Washington, D.C.

After our pilgrimage of forty days through the desert of Lent, our own exodus from bondage to the Promised Land, the Christian Church arrives today at the gates of the city of Jerusalem. This is the place where first we join our voices with the children of the Hebrews and acclaim, ‘Hosanna to the Son of David’, and yet also the way by which we enter into the mystery of the Lord’s saving acts: the institution of the Eucharist and the sacred priesthood, the sacrifice of Christ on the cross of Calvary, and the great joy of his resurrection. In short, the coming days of the sacred triduum present us anew with the fullness of life in Christ, a life which is found in the communion of his holy Church.

It is fitting that Jerusalem is the location for these profound events. It is here that the first temple stood as a sign of the covenant between God and the people of Israel – a temple destroyed and yet rebuilt in Christ, who is the priest, the altar, and the lamb of sacrifice. It is here that the psalmist and prophets tell us that the Messiah will come to begin his work of restoring God’s people to their rightful place. And it is to here that Moses led the people of Israel to freedom from slavery in Egypt, as God vanquished and overcame their oppressors.

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Homily for Friday of Lent V

11 Friday Apr 2014

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The pieta in the Anglican parish of Saint Silas, Kentish Town, London

The pieta in the Anglican parish of Saint Silas, Kentish Town, London

As today’s collect reflects, by tradition the Friday before Holy Week is kept in honour of the seven sorrows of the Blessed Virgin Mary. These are seven ways, described in sacred scripture, in which Our Lady comes to share in the sufferings of her beloved son. Depictions of Our Lady of Sorrows (see above) often show seven swords piercing her heart, recalling the words of the prophet Simeon in the temple, ‘A sword shall pierce your own heart’ (Lk. 2:35).

This revelation of Simeon to Our Lady is the first sorrow, followed by the flight into Egypt (Mt. 2:13-14) and the finding of the Lord in the temple (Lk. 3:43-45). In these three moments, Our Lady suffers with and through her divine son because of her unflinching obedience to God’s will. The four remaining scenes: the meeting of Our Lord and the women of Jerusalem on the road to Calvary (usually understood to include Our Lady), the crucifixion, the deposition (from which we get the beautiful image of the pieta), and the burial of the Lord, each show a more obvious tie with the events of the passion itself.

As Our Lady stood by the cross of her son, so the feast of Our Lady of Sorrows now (in the ordinary form) follows that of the Holy Cross, in September. And yet, we are right to reflect in these days before Holy Week on these sufferings of the Mother of the Lord, because by them we are taught how our own lives can more closely reflect Christ’s passion, filled as they often are with disappointment, with anxiety, and with unpleasantness at the hands of others. It is for this reason that we make the Church’s hymn, Stabat Mater, our own today: ‘O thou Mother! fount of love! touch my spirit from above, make my heart with thine accord: make me feel as thou hast felt; make my soul to glow and melt with the love of Christ my Lord’.

O God, who in this season
give your Church the grace
to imitate devoutly the Blessed Virgin Mary
in contemplating the Passion of Christ,
grant, we pray, through her intercession,
that we may cling more firmly each day
to your Only Begotten Son
and come at last to the fullness of his grace.
Who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, for ever and ever.
Amen.

Alternative collect in the 2002 Missale Romanum.

Homily for Thursday of Lent V

10 Thursday Apr 2014

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Detail from the apse of the Ruthenian Catholic Proto-Cathedral in Los Angeles, CA

Detail from the apse of the Ruthenian Catholic Proto-Cathedral in Los Angeles, CA

The Eagle and Child pub in Oxford (known colloquially as, The Bird and Baby) is frequented as much by tourists keen to follow in the steps of Tolkein and C. S. Lewis, as undergraduates seeking a warming pint of good beer on a frosty November evening. Tolkein and Lewis are still very much present in the atmosphere of Oxford, and it is to C. S. Lewis that our minds might understandably turn in hearing today’s gospel. His trilemma: lunatic, liar, or Lord, is a simple way of saying that either Jesus Christ was and is who he claimed, or else he is a lunatic ‘on the level with the man who says he is a poached egg’, or the devil himself.

It is a stark but real choice. In today’s gospel the Lord makes this claim; not to be a prophet or great leader, but God himself. Even the great Abraham, we are told, ‘rejoiced to see my day’. And he further invokes the memory of Moses, who led the people from slavery in Egypt to the promised land, when he proclaims, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, before Abraham came to be, I AM’. Just as the Lord revealed himself to the Moses in the burning bush – ‘I AM that I AM’ – so Christ here claims to share in the same title – that of God.

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Homily for Tuesday of Lent V

08 Tuesday Apr 2014

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Good Friday at Holy Ghost, Balham

Good Friday at the church of the Holy Ghost, Balham

This morning’s old testament reading from the book of Numbers (21: 4-9) describes a scenario that should resonate in the Christian mind. The children of Israel, passing through the Red Sea waters and escaping slavery in Egypt, are on their forty year pilgrimage to the Promised Land. They have been liberated from bondage by God, and yet they complain to Moses, ‘Why have you brought us from Egypt to die in this desert?’. In return the Lord sends snakes as punishment – the bites of which prove lethal to the Israelites, who in turn beg Moses, ‘Pray the Lord to take the serpents away from us’. The Lord commands Moses, ‘Make a bronze serpent and mount it on a pole, and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live’. We are told, ‘Whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived’.

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Homily for Passion Sunday (EF)

07 Monday Apr 2014

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The high altar of Saint John the Evangelist, Iffley Road

The high altar of Saint John the Evangelist, Iffley Road, prepared for Passion Sunday

This homily was given at Old Saint John’s, Silver Spring, Maryland, at a Low Mass in the extraordinary form of the Roman rite:

It is difficult to believe the transformation from the joy and consolation of last Sunday’s festivities to this. Holy Mother Church now stands in solemn anticipation of the passion of her blessed Lord, as her preparation in the weeks of Septuagesima merge into those of Lent itself, and now unfold into Passiontide. The sacred liturgy today is marked by an increasingly sombre mood; each of the texts evokes the impending drama of road to Calvary. The church is draped in mournful violet – not just the Priest and the altar, but so also the figure of the crucified Lord himself. As we read in the gospel, the Lord ‘hid himself and went out of the temple’, so our representation of him is poignantly removed from our sight as we fix our eyes not simply on a sign of his sacrifice, but that sacrifice itself.

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