My posts here, after starting so strong and frequent last semester, have slowed to a trickle now, it seems. I regret that. The troubles and stresses and demands of school have dogpiled on. And, more significantly, I am grappling with serious depression. Growing up, I always heard that “Jesus is the same, yesterday, today, and …
Category Archives: Liturgy
In Christ There is No South or North
So, hi. It’s been a while. My break has unfortunately been nearly as frazzling as school, with just as many thousands of things to do, but without the enforced structure of the academic week. I’ve had a lot of things on my mind, not least among them the Church. So I have several items to …
A Musical Journey
I’ve already written a little about my first flirtations with liturgy: how I began listening to Mozart’s Requiem as “mood music,” at a time when I was feeling morbidly depressed. I listened to it repeatedly, reflecting on failure and death and loss; recalling the sad end of Mozart’s life, and the idea that he was …
Advent, and the New English Translation of the Missal
Today is the beginning of Advent, the liturgical season of expectation and preparation for the Nativity of Christ on Christmas. I’ve never celebrated Advent before, that I recall. (I remember the celebration of Advent from the year or two we attended the United Methodist church when I was a child. We had an Advent wreath …
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Semper reformanda: The Continuity of Vatican II with Catholic Tradition
Last week I met briefly with Father Joe for my first RCIA interview. The biggest question I’ve been having, I told him, was about the Second Vatican Council. I posted about these thoughts recently. Tonight at RCIA, as if in answer to my prayers, we had a guest speaker, Father Scott, who spoke at length on …
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Kyriale
Tonight I started missing the old musical settings of the Mass, the ones we used to sing before the bishop ordered new ones — especially the Kyrie, which was always dearest to me. So I thought I would go and find them. Only I knew next to nothing about chant settings. I went on YouTube and searched …
Semper reformanda
Today is the liturgical celebration of Blessed Pope John XXIII (1881-1963, r. 1958-1963). I note that the date of his celebration is not the day of his death, but that of his historic opening of the Second Vatican Council on 11 October 1962. I don’t remember “Good Pope John,” but from all that I’ve read he …
The Great Amen
I badly need to get back to my grading. I still have 23 exams to go before tomorrow, and I have RCIA in four hours — but allow me to nerd for a few minutes about liturgy. I don’t know much about liturgy. I had no liturgical background at all where I’m coming from. So I’m fascinated …
Kyrie, eleison
Kyrie, eleison. Christe, eleison. Kyrie, eleison. The Kyrie is an early Christian prayer, with antecedents even before Christianity, with which we open our daily Mass most days at our parish church (we sing it after the Confiteor, “I confess,” in our Sunday Mass). It’s transliterated from the Greek, Κύριε, ἐλέησον — “Lord, have mercy” — and borrowed …