Following the Crowd

Palm Sunday

Cycle A

Someone once said that people alone are smart; crowds are stupid. It’s one of those paradoxes of life that we all want to be thought of as unique, but we also want to fit into the crowd. Popular music, the fashion industry, politics, even our Christian faith, all hinge on what the crowd thinks is right and cool and acceptable. And when someone breaks out of the crowd and dresses, or acts, or believes differently they are held up as mavericks or denigrated as freaks. We look at them with a secret envy and a bit of fear. We’d like to be different, too, but are afraid of what the crowd would say if we were. Crowds are a safe way for us to break out of our comfort zones anonymously.

I often wonder about those two crowds in today’s gospels. How many of them were true disciples of Jesus, or true haters of Jesus, and how many were just going along with the crowd? I can imagine that many of them were just passing by and saw a commotion, and they joined in without knowing what they were doing. It’s easy to start a crowd. Just stand on a street corner and look up into the sky for a minute. You’ll form a crowd all looking up into the sky, for no reason except that other people are doing it.

In our celebrity-celebrating society today we all love to build the beautiful people up with unrealistic expectations only to relish tearing them down later on. The higher they are the harder they fall. We like to stand on the sidelines as judge and jury, without ever getting too close to the subject and without thinking of how it hurts people.

I think the people of Jerusalem were the same way. They had heard rumors of Jesus the prophet, saw a crowd forming, and joined in the celebration. Then, when another crowd formed at the Roman praetorium calling for his death, they just jumped right in again, without a thought to who they were condemning or what it would mean. After he was condemned, they simply went back to their lives, until the next flash mob formed.

Group think doesn’t have to happen in a crowd. Oftentimes we act as a crowd when we’re by ourselves. One example is the ever popular saying “I’m spiritual but not religious”. People pop off with these ideas without really thinking about what they are saying or considering the consequences. And ideas can go viral. Someone speaks it, then another and another, until suddenly it becomes conventional wisdom, even if it’s wrong.

Do we follow the crowd when it comes to Jesus? When we come to Mass are we just following the crowd, praising Jesus as our king without truly knowing who he is? Do we join the crowd because everyone else is? Is it easy to join in when Jesus is popular with our friends? And what happens when he isn’t popular anymore? When it’s not cool to be his disciple anymore? Do we jump on the bandwagon that his Church is just not relevant in today’s world anymore? Do we stick with the easy teachings and ignore the hard ones that go against the conventional wisdom? Do we go so far as to call for his death, or the death of his ideas, or of his Church?

Or even worse, are we the silent ones on the edge of the crowd who find it amusing when the crowd is for him but say nothing when the crowd turns on him? Do we even want to get involved?

Keep this in mind as we enter now into the church in triumphant procession. Remember that just as we’re part of the adoring crowd now we’ll soon be part of the one who condemns him.

Eat. Pray. Love.

How many of you are familiar with the book and the movie that came out last year, Eat. Pray. Love. It’s the story of a middle aged woman who is desperately searching for meaning in her life. She divorces her husband and goes on a year-long odyssey around the world trying to find what is missing. As I was watching it I kept thinking about this story of the woman at the well. The two women seem to be the same. Both have a hard time with relationships with men. Both are thirsting for meaning in their lives and try to quench that thirst with physical, material things like sex and food and intellectual pursuits. Both turn to worship, but don’t quite get it right. Their understanding of what it means to worship God, their images of God himself, are incomplete. And both end up turning to love to find their final fulfillment. The woman at the well finds her reality and meaning in the Savior of the World while the woman in the movie still doesn’t quite get what she’s looking for. She is still thirsty at the end.

I think many of us are like the woman in the movie. Everyone thirsts for something, and we try to find what we need first by indulging in the pleasures of the flesh. Then, when we find that to be empty we turn to spirituality, either in the form of the Christianity of our youth or in some other exotic path focused on the self. Finally, we turn to love. But if that love is not love himself – Jesus Christ – we still thirst.

It’s really just all about Jesus. We must encounter Jesus. Every time the woman at the well tried to change the subject, Jesus kept coming back with “It’s all about me”. We Catholics don’t confess that we’ve accepted Jesus as our own personal savior, like the Evangelicals do. But isn’t that what it’s all about? We focus so much on the externals of the Church that we tend to lose sight of who that Church is following. It’s sort of like reading a biography of a famous person and coming away with knowledge of that person’s life, but having no relationship with that person. We are just observers, not participants. We can read the bible through and through, come to Mass every day, and fulfill all our obligations as Catholics, but if those actions don’t cause us to personally encounter Christ, we will find our faith to be empty.

I often say that Christianity is the only major religion that does not follow a philosophy; we follow a person. Christianity is not just a set of tenets or precepts to follow. It is not just a set of guidelines on how to live a good life. It is a relationship with God that must be deeply personal. All those other things follow naturally if we first have that relationship; if not they are simply reduced to intellectual exercises. Like the woman at the well, we must encounter Christ and then change our lives.

The major difference between the woman at the well and the woman in the movie is that the woman at the well’s encounter with love radically changes her life. She reforms her life and is saved. The woman in the movie never really changes. Her pain just goes beneath the surface as she covers it with a physical love that cannot really satisfy her. She has searched everywhere for fulfillment except for where she needed to. She is focused on externals, not on relationship. She never encounters Christ, and so her search continues.

All this is well and good, but how and where do we encounter Christ and how do we have a relationship with him? It’s simple for us Catholics. Eat. Pray. Love.

First we must eat. The woman in the movie goes to Italy for a few months and basically eats her way through the country. There’s something about a meal that we are naturally drawn to. Meals do more than simply quell our hunger. We use meals to get closer to other people. We use meals to deepen our relationships. Many of our significant life events take place around meals. And so it is with our lives as Catholics. We must partake of the Eucharistic banquet if we are ever to really encounter Christ. We must have supper with Jesus. In the Mass we can truly find him because he is truly here. We can be intimate with him here, because how much more intimate can you be with him than to consume his body and blood? Where else could you learn more about Jesus than through your conversation with him in the sacrifice of the Mass? Where else could your spiritual hunger be filled than by doing what you were created to do? Remember he said, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood you will have no life within you.” We need to be intimate with the Bread of Life.

Second, we must pray. We must take the time to nurture our relationship with Jesus. I quiet prayer. In common worship. We must communicate with our lover Jesus just as we communicate with one another. And prayer is not just saying a bunch of words in a certain order at a certain time. Prayer is first and foremost knowing who you are communicating with, and then listening as much or more than talking. You do not have to search for God in exotic places. He is right here. He is waiting to communicate with you if you just get out of the way. And we must try many different forms of prayer because God cannot be experienced in any one way, but in many.

Finally, we must love. If we truly encounter Jesus than we can’t help but love. The movement towards love is a natural progression, because we were created to love and to be loved. We must accept the love of Christ even though we know we can never earn it. And we must love in return without reservation. Interestingly, it was at that very same well that Jakob met his future wife Rebecca. He didn’t know that he would encounter love there, and the woman didn’t think she would encounter love when she went to draw water that day either. Love arrives when we least expect it. But the love of Jesus is the only thing that will satisfy our deepest, innermost need.

If we are willing to take the plunge.

Changes to Roman Missal Part 1

As you may have heard, there are some pretty important changes about to take place in the way we pray during the Mass. The Mass itself will stay the same, but the sound and rhythm will be different. Because these changes will affect us all it is vital that we take the time to discuss them in depth so that the transition will be as seamless as possible.

Words mean something, and the way we put them together when we communicate is very important. We use grammer to give form to our words, so that everyone can understand what we mean. We don’t just string our words together any which way, as each of us thinks they should go. We give a formality to our words, so that everyone is on the same page and we can be understood.

It’s the same with liturgy, and the words we use in liturgy. Liturgy is more than just the way that we pray together. Each and every Mass is more than just what is taking place here, in this church, at this time. Each and every Mass is tied together into every other Mass that is being celebrated everywhere in the world that day, but also with every Mass that has ever been celebrated before and every Mass that will be celebrated in the future. Whoa. Heavy metaphysics. But that’s important to understand when we try to address the language of the Mass. Because it’s not about us only, here at St. Mary’s, this morning. When we celebrate the Mass we are celebrating it with all other Catholics around the world, always. And so unity in liturgy is vital.

There is a saying that the way we pray is the way we believe. The Church doesn’t generate the liturgy, the liturgy generates the Church. The Mass isn’t what we do, it’s what we are. And it does matter how we say things during the Mass. Just as we learned our English grammer and our teachers marked up our papers for spelling, grammer and punctuation, we must also learn a grammer to speak Christian. Grammer gives form to what we want to say in English, well, liturgy tries to conform to the language of God. Liturgy is not an expression of how people see things, rather it proposes how God sees all people. We don’t do liturgy, God does us. And liturgy is formal not because it is stuffy, but because we need to give form to what we do.

Why all this heavy theological stuff? Because you need to understand that the Church is not just making arbitrary changes. We’re not doing this because we’ve been doing it wrong for forty years. And we’re not abandoning the renewal of the Second Vatican Council. The Mass had been solely in Latin for 1500 years. It has only been in English for a little over 40 years. And the Church has been striving to perfect the language of liturgy constantly over the centuries. Jesus didn’t give the apostles a big red book with all the prayers in it. He only told them to “Do this in memory of me” and they went about trying to form the words to describe that reality and their experience. We are still doing that today. These are not the first changes that have been made to the Mass, and they won’t be the last.

In our creed we say we believe in One, holy, catholic and apostolic Church. We are called to unity in Christ. And part of that unity is unity of language. For over 1500 years the language of the Church has been Latin. By using a common language or our worship we can all use the same grammer and form, and so be unified in prayer. Therefore, faithfulness to what the Latin says and means is vital to our being in full communion with Catholics the world over. That is why a new translation of the Latin into English was seen to be necessary. Overall, the revised translation more closely adheres to the original Latin than the first English translation did forty years ago. Translators now have a firmer grasp of the meaning of the original texts, giving them more depth. The new translation will be in a more formal style than we use in ordinary conversation; remember, we are trying to speak in the language of God. It’s supposed to be different.

Some things, such as the Lamb of God, the readings, and your favorite hymns, will not change at all. Other things, such as the beginning of the Gloria, and parts of the Profession of Faith, have been completely rewritten. Many of the changes are to the prayers said by the priest, so they don’t affect you much. But several of our responses to those prayers have changed, so we will be called upon to memorize them anew. It will be hard for those of us who have grown up saying one response and will now have to learn another, and there will be some awkward moments in the next year as we get them mixed up, but that’s ok.

Just because you may have grown up with the Mass being done in a certain way doesn’t mean it had always been done that way. The Tradition of the Church always maintains a strong connection to the past while remaining relevant to modern ways. Some people will have a problem with any changes, and some folks won’t notice much change at all. Your attitude towards these changes will affect how we do liturgy, how it feels, and so the onus is on us not to make this into a cause for division.

We all have a choice. We can work together to implement these changes in the spirit they have been made, and try to understand the meaning behind them, or we can let it divide us. I think that many of us have become so used to the language of the past forty years that we have stopped listening to what we’ve actually been saying. It has become rote. Perhaps if we are forced to concentrate on what the priest is saying and on our responses we will actually hear our prayer again. It is a good time now to re-focus on our prayers, and to take the time to understand exactly what it is that we are doing here during the Mass.

The new translation will go into effect here in the United States on the first Sunday of Advent, November 27. In future weeks we will be discussing each of the new changes in detail, so that everyone can understand what they are and why they are being made. Thank you for your patience and support.