Postmodern Liturgist Resources

This past weekend, some of us were out of town visiting friends and relatives in a conservative diocese. Of course we were apprehensive about how things would go. We’re glad to report that postmodern liturgy is alive and well even in one of the US’ most benighted -- er -- conservative dioceses!

The church itself was conveniently nestled in next to a McDonalds and a gas station. The entryway was abuzz with activity complete with the priest mingling as we arrived. He was young enough (40ish) to make us nervous that he might be a “young fogey” like this, this, or even one of them. As you’ll see, our fears were wholly unfounded.

We passed a tiled Jacuzzi to enter into an octagonal room. The altar table was on a platform in the middle of the room. A mixture of pews and chairs surrounded it on seven of the eight sides, with a dark credence table on the eighth side. The tabernacle cupboard was unobstrusively tucked away behind a seating section. Near the altar was a large wooden outline of a cross and, in front of that, a terra-cotta figure of a rather androgynous person with arms outstretched. It was neither a traditional crucifix nor a “resurrexifix”, but more like a figure doing calisthenics (spiritual exercises?) while standing in front of a cross. Other than this, the room was nearly Spartan in its simplicity. There were a few small stained glass windows, but they depicted only splotches of color. The Stations of the Cross were sufficiently small, dark and abstract that we couldn’t tell which was which even from only about 20 feet away. Fittingly there were no visible images of saints or angels.

The room filled up quickly with young and old alike. An older womyn came to the center of the sanctuary before Mass and asked for six more Eucharistic ministers to join her in the gathering space as there apparently weren’t enough of them. The gathering song was a song none of us had ever encountered before. It was suitably folksy, vague and repetitive.

Father’s opening remarks made it clear that the second reading (Paul calling the Corinthians to task for divisions among themselves) would be the principal focus of his remarks today. In the introduction to the Kyrie, we were charged to repent for our “feelings of superiority to people of other religions”. During the few moments of quiet, we could hear the Jacuzzi burbling away.

Father drew on the “divisions” theme of the second reading to denounce several attitudes and actions. He vilified parish staff for differentiating in conversation between the children who attend the parish school and those who don’t. He said that we shouldn’t look to what distinguishes our religion from others, but that the most profound components of religion were those shared by all religions – even polytheistic and pantheistic religions. To provide a counterexample of the importance of looking at commonalities, he mentioned that Moslems believe not in Heaven and Hell, but in Heaven and Purgatory which he concluded was “more sane” than the traditional belief in eternal damnation.

The date was January 22 – the anniversary of Roe v. Wade – so we were worried that Father might say something impolitic about Choice. His one reference to the topic was in conjunction with the terrorism angle: “If you call someone an Islamic terrorist, then you should call all those folks who blow up abortion clinics Christian terrorists”. Good – at least he recognized the real problem! He also said that, by the standards we use to label others as “Islamic terrorists” or “Jewish terrorists”, Tim McVeigh was a Christian terrorist. We started getting nervous again – this time that Mass might not end promptly, as the homily was well past twenty minutes with no sign of slowing down.

In the most surprising twist, Father contended that Jesus himself displayed a non-proselytizing attitude by waiting until after John the Baptist was arrested before beginning his own public ministry and thus set the example for us to avoid proselytization. He concluded that we should all seek to learn as much as we can from non-Christian religions.

During the preparation of the gifts, we started to appreciate the need for so many Eucharistic ministers as there were a dozen crystal goblets on the altar. Our worries about timeliness were also misplaced as Father (who must have once trained as an auctioneer) got through the Eucharistic prayer with impressive dispatch. At the consecration it looked like he was holding an Eggo waffle aloft (we later saw that it was just an oddly shaped whole-wheat pita). A few oldsters knelt after the Agnus Dei, but more people sat and some stood. We enjoyed a song by the master himself during communion. The twenty or so Eucharistic ministers were distinguished from the rest of the laity as they wore large enamel pectoral crosses. The irony of this “division” among the congregation was palpable. After communion, the clanking of the many enamel crosses on the credence table momentarily drowned out the burbling of the Jacuzzi. A symbol of the eschatalogical cessation of all divisions, perhaps?

The dismissal led into a rousing rendition of “We Are Called”. However we thought that “As a Fire is Meant for Burning” would have been more fitting. On the way out, we noticed a sign above a door marking the “reconciliation center”. Our joy was thus made very nearly full -- sad to say that the Jacuzzi had not yet been enhanced with a blue stone toad.