   |
||
|
Conclusion to Volume II |
||
|
Some Personal Reflections |
||
| I. 30 plus years since the Second Vatican Council | ||
| A. What has changed? | ||
| 1. The Mass then--I just sat and watched a videotape of the "old Tridentine Solemn High Mass". I had forgotten how much we never participated in it. Just three times in the course of an hour and one half did the priest acknowledge the people's presence by saying "Dominus Vobiscum" facing them. The rest of the mass was strictly the clerics mass; i.e., priests, deacons, subdeacons, acolytes. We really were there to pray, pay and obey and that was it. It was a sacred and holy moment in our lives, but somehow never really included us in that moment with God. | ||
| 2. The Mass Now--Today we participate fully in the celebration of mass. We sing together. We stand, sit and kneel together. We pray together. We are involved in what the priest is doing up there in the sanctuary. The mass today is the people's mass with the priest celebrating as the presider over the entire moment with God. We are God's people today, not just God's spectators. | ||
| 3. The Catholic People Then--Before the Second Vatican Council Catholics went to Mass because they were all going to hell on a rail if they didn't. It was a legalistic mind-set because we were a legalistic Church. We lived in fear that we would never be good enough and so going to mass meant that we were at least trying to find God in our lives. We went to Church because we had to, not because we wanted to be there. We rarely received communion because of that mind-set and therefore deprived ourselves of the Lord out of fear and a life-style script that said "Yes, you're right, you'll never be good enough for God!" It was a mind-set of God and me alone. | ||
| 4. The Catholic People Now--Today we truly are a people of God. We've managed to get passed that old script of "never being good enough" and have come to realize that we are truly good enough for God. What a joy it is to see people coming to communion in droves. Are we perfect? NO! Are we a pilgrim people on a faith journey? YES!! And that makes us good enough. No longer do we hold that mind-set that we had to be in Church on Sunday. Today we come to mass because we want to be there. We come to celebrate our God and our lives and try and live out the commandments of Christ that say "Love God, Love your neighbor, love yourself." It's a much healthier view of God and the person sitting next to us. It's not just God and me, it's God and us. | ||
| 5. The Songs Then--As observers of the mass and choirs we listened to some of the most beautiful music ever written and sung. We listened to that wonderful pipe organ vibrate the walls of Church with awesome beauty and resonance. The key hear is listen! We sang very little, if at all, and that music filled our hearts with hope and heavenly beauty that one day the Lord will play that music for us in heaven. | ||
| 6. The Songs Now--We are a pilgrim Church on a journey and that path had led us far from the beauty of that old pipe organ that began to collect dust. We sang Protestant songs because we didn't have any that people could sing. Then we went to changing the words of secular songs to religious words--YUK! And finally we have our own composers and musicians and our music is finally saying to Catholics what we need to hear and sing about. Did we lose entirely the ancient and old and beautiful hymns, almost! But today we are combining the ancient with the new songs and we are developing our own style of music within Church and it is wonderful. It's not so unusual to hear that wonderful old pipe organ being dusted off and used to accompany both the old and new songs. And we are becoming a singing people again. We were once many hundreds of years ago and we are again. We are comfortable enough with singing both Protestant compositions and Catholic compositions. Thank God we've dropped the secular stuff. To walk inside a Catholic Church at mass today is to hear the Catholic people singing praise to God in good and not so good voices, but we are singing and as St. Augustine said: "We are praying twice when we sing." | ||
