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| Photo by Dupont Media World |
With Palm Sunday, Holy Week has begun.
This weekend in the parish was filled with prayer and grace as we celebrated the liturgy that draws us into the Paschal Mystery.
At the 9:30 and 11:30 a.m. Masses today we proclaimed the gospel of the Passion with the ministry of two of our adult lectors and a "chorus" of 20 high school students. You see them in place above and, below, at the moment when the assembly kneels and contemplates the death of Christ. (Click on any of the photos for great enlargements.)
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| Photo by Dupont Media World |
Among these face you'll find the voices of narrators, Peter, Pilate, priests and pharisees, bystanders, a crowd, two thieves, a centurion and Jesus. It was a wonderful experience for our parish to hear the gospel delivered by such young voices and I'm sure these young people, for perhaps the rest of their lives, will never hear the story of the Passion in quite the same way.
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| Photo by Dupont Media World |
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Special Mass for three generations in my family. As I told a friend, I left the service today with a peace I did not have when I entered.
ReplyDeleteThank you for sharing your pictures with us. It is interesting to note how your parish is enlivened by the pastoral approach in your liturgical celebrations. Not only in your vestments of red cum violet stole, the visible presence and participation of the youth but also in the sensitivity for the faithful's posture of sitting down for a more active listening and engagement during the Gospel. In short, the liturgical life of your community is powerfully dynamic and unrestrained by the rigors of rubrics prescribed by the "book." I praise and thank God for your worship. Amen!
ReplyDeleteIt is sad to see a parish ignore the rubrics and forgo standing at attention to hear the Passion. Did not Our Lady stand at the foot of the cross for hours, suffering with Jesus? This seems like a service that draws more attention to the participants than to the Word.
ReplyDeleteI'm grateful for both Fr. Roy's and for Chris' comments.
ReplyDeleteI suspect that both Fr. Roy and Chris (who have different takes on liturgy in my parish) would have benefited from participating in our Palm Sunday liturgies.
I believe Fr. Roy would have found our worship more restrained by the rigors of the book than he might imagine and I believe Chris would have experienced the Liturgy of the Word as indeed focused on the scriptures, not on the participants.
For more on our Palm Sunday liturgy check here.