Boo

One of the constant temptations of this blog is to slide into "pick on the parish" mode. It's so easy. Like fish in a barrel, she said imaginatively, even though National Cliche Day was long past.

There is such a plethora of Catholic nuttiness out there, and one could literally fill a blog with it, every day. And not just from the "left" or the "mediocre middle," either.

(In his travels, my husband has attended one particular church in a particular city in the South, three times now. The first time he went there just because of convenience, but has returned out of morbid curiosity. The Mass is mostly in Latin - Novus Ordo - prayed at breakneck speed in a deep southern accent by an elderly priest who has apparently been there for years. Decades. The second time Michael went there, for a daily Mass, the priest showed up about 15 minutes before Mass began, plopped himself in the Presider's chair,and read the newspaper for a while before he returned to the sacristy to vest. He tells very strange stories. And at the end of Sunday Mass, the Star-Spangled Banner is sung. Michael feels that Walker Percy must have attended this Church before he wrote Love in the Ruins. )

But we try not to do this, just because. Although a National Mystery Church Goer Blog would certainly be a worthwhile project. A Ship of Fools kind of thing, but focused on the U.S. Catholic Church.

So, all that is by way of introducing another lovely liturgy. Another HALLOWEEN MASS as it happens. Yay!

Gerald at Closed Cafeteria must be given credit for this one. No, not that he did it, but that he brought it to our attention.

No shaky phone camera YouTube this time, though - it's a lovely slide show on the parish website. A parish in MIchigan.

Same idea, it seems - sanctuary decorated with jack-o-laterns, black cats and spiders. Children and a few adults coming in costume. (Note that the church is about half-full, I'd say). Priest in costume.

At first I thought the priest's costume was some sort of medieval clerical robe tossed over his vestments. The musicians seemed to be doing a Renaissance thing, so it seemed logical. But in reading the comments at Gerald's and studying the photos, I saw...no. The red cape and hood are a devil costume! Which, apparently, during the homily, the priest turns inside out to reveal a white cape - an angel. It appears from the one slide of the rest of Mass, he ditches the costume for the Liturgy of the Eucharist. Well.

It is such a hard, hard thing to be in ministry - any kind of ministry. Our culture is loud and raucous and seductive and promises all kinds of things and seems to deliver on a lot of them - for now. Religion seems to be the last thing on anyone's mind, except as the fulfilment of some sort of vague social identity that Good Citizens must have.

And so we struggle to figure out how to make our way in this, how to just get people in the door so they can just hear a bit - even a little bit - of what we have to say, and we pray we say it in a way that means something, that rises above the rest of the cacophany and might, just might next week bring them back for more - a little more, a little deeper.

But this is not it. Not this in particular or the general idea it represents.

You see, we seem to think that this seductive, attractive culture we live in, in which we struggle to hear Christ in, is the first and the worst. No one has ever had to live in times like these, we think. Christianity has never had to compete with anything like this. So we have to constantly come up with completely new stuff, and the past has no value at all. Because no one ever had to deal with this before. It was never like this.

Oh, yes it has - and worse. The seven deadly sins were not invented yesterday. They idea of "temptation" is not a new one. The Gospel has always been lived and preached in a world of selfishness and despair, of cruelty and pleasure-seeking. It's called the world.

What is more challenging - to preach the Gospel in a country in which everything material is attainable and decent health is the norm or a society in which despair threatens in the guise of Plague or War or Martyrdom?

My point is that this frantic insistence, with us for too many years now, that Catholics have to constantly Make Stuff Up and Be Like the MegaChurches and Relate and Make it Real just doesn't work. It doesn't lead us anywhere. It takes what should be - what is a feast, and serves a little bowl of carrots instead.

Jesting, feasting, frolicing, festivals, masque, joyous, earthy music and raucousness are all very Catholic. Jansenists and a few others excepted.

But not during Mass.

Someone - perhaps in our previous discussion of Halloween Mass 1.0 - wondered if some of this insistence on playing with Mass and incorporating really inapporpriate music into Mass could be blamed, in part on the fact that in much of the Catholic world, everything but Mass was wiped out. Can't blame it all on V2,  now. There are the sociological reasons, the development of suburbia, the collapse of close-knit ethnic communities, the mobility.

But still. If you know your History of Pastoral Practices, you know that all of that other stuff became distinctly déclassé in the Bright New Church. So everything got dumped on Sunday Mass.

Even Halloween costumes, apparently.

I have more, but I said it before.

The unintentional poignancy of this slide show is the music. Bach accompanies the first part, and then it switches into something different and even more resonant - Blessed is the Man, sung by the St. Eliyah's Children Choir. The dissonance between sound and image is pretty breathtaking.

The Saint Elijah Church, situated in Podol district of Kyiv, is the first Russian Orthodox church ever built. According to legend, it was built by the Prince Askold and Dir long before the baptizing of Kyiv Rus. The Saint chronicler Nestor writes about this event in his Fable of Ancient Times.

In 988 The Great equel to Apostle Prince Vladimir began baptizing the people of Kyiv Rus near this church on the banks of the Dnieper River.

And now this church, though small in size is under jurisdiction of the Metropolitan of Kyiv and the whole Ukraine Vladimir is a favourite place for praying for the Kyivites. Archiepriest Vitaly Kosovskiy is the dean of the church since 1991.

On the 19th of December 1996 the childrens choir began to sing for the glory of God.

The children regularly take part in Sunday and festive liturgies and has become an integral part of ther life. The choir also has consert activities. During a short time of its existence it won the All-Ukranian (1997, the town of Rivne) and International (1998, the town of Eupatoria) festivals.

In this album you can hear both little-known old spiritual songs of the 16-17th centuries and traditional and authors spirituel hymns of liturgies of the 18th beginning of the 20th centuries.

Special attention should be paid to old Ukranian cantical part of the album where warm feelings of Ukranian people to God are particularly expressed. The choir has become the first Orthodox childrens choir of Kyiv after almost a one hundred years interval. 

If only they could come to liturgy dressed as a robot and giggle at Father in his devil/angel cape. Then we'd really be teaching them that Christian thing.