My experience of the changes to the Mass

Nov 27, 2011 | Blog

Now that I've celebrated a weekend's worth of Masses with the new English edition of the Roman Missal, here are my initial reflections. I'm curious to know: did my experiences line up with your own, or were they different?
  • Some commentators were predicting doom and gloom with the new translation, with people leaving the church and so forth. Well... the sun came up today. We prayed as best we can. And it all went fairly well over here.
  • The Grey Cup is this evening. I think the BC Lions will win, although I'd love to see Doug Brown and Paul LaPolice win. It's Brown's last game before he retires as a player, and I want to erase the mental image I have of LaPolice banging his hat on the desk after the 2009 edition... which we will never, ever speak of again.
  • I found it got easier to get into the rhythm and prayerful nature of the Mass the more times I celebrated it with the new words.
  • The quiet prayers that the priest prays were the most tricky things for me to do. I memorized them way back in the seminary and changing them won't come easily.
  • The new chants for the presider are beautiful but will take some time to learn.
  • The new prayers are beautiful. But I need to caution myself here: They aren't new prayers! They've been in the Latin text (and the texts of other languages) all along. But that groovy 1970s English... lost so much of the poetic nature of what was already in the original text. I mean, the image of "running forth to meet your Christ" from the Collect for today, or the image of "the rising of the sun to its setting" in Eucharistic Prayer III are all meaningful, poetic images that have sadly been missing for decades from our English translation.
  • The new translation is a bit more of a mouthful for the priest than before. But I'm finding this to actually be a good thing: It forces me to look over, reflect upon, and practice the prayers beforehand. That's never a bad thing.
  • The congregation seemed to do reasonably well. The new setting composed by Fr. Geoffrey Angeles is beautiful and easy enough to sing. The response where the people seemed to trip up the most was, not surprisingly, "And with your spirit." That was most true just before the Gospel. "And also with you" is so ingrained in us after having said it so often since the mid-1970s.
    •   All in all, I'm quite pleased with the changes and how they went over this weekend!

    A great talk by Fr. Bill Burke

    Nov 25, 2011 | Blog

    "Blind faith is a strange gift to return to the God who made human intellect." This is a fantastic talk on mystery and liturgy given by Fr. Bill Burke, Director of the National Liturgy Office of the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops. It's close to a half hour long and well worth it. (Thanks to Salt and Light TV for providing the video online!)

    Welcome to the website!

    Nov 23, 2011 | Blog

    Well... not quite this website. I recently created a video as a welcome to my parish site. I decided to create it in response to Brandon Vogt's thought-provoking blog post about using video. Statistics show that someone is far more likely to stay longer on a website with video content than without. Anecdotally, I noticed a similar phenomenon when the podcast that I co-host attempted a video episode. We had a good number more hits on that show than on the ones immediately before and after. Yes, this is completely anecdotal and my old statistics professor probably wouldn't like the rather small sample size (one). But that was my experience. So I decided to try it again on my parish site. What do you think?

    It’s beginning to look a lot like…

    Nov 21, 2011 | Blog

    Winter? Advent? Well, neither season is technically here yet, but the temperature and snow outside sure make it seem like winter. We were getting wind chills of between -30 and -40 degrees Celsius this weekend. Oddly enough, the dog is not taking very long to do its, umm, business outside. It's also almost Advent, but not quite yet. One of the things that's really driven it home is that this past weekend, we did the decommissioning blessing of the old sacramentary in preparation for using the brand new Roman Missal this upcoming weekend. It's exciting... and a bit daunting. It'll be interesting to see how the change goes. It may be rough sailing for a few weeks/months, but my hunch is that by this time next year the new wording will become second nature to us. And the new prayers - especially the collects - are really quite beautiful. We have been missing out on so much of the poetic language that's been present in the Mass all along in other languages. Finally, if you haven't done so yet, you NEED to check out Fr. Robert Barron's Catholicism Series. It's mind blowing. Seriously. Several parishes are beginning to show it (I'm planning to do so in the new year in Watson), and Salt and Light TV has also begun to show it. Check it out!

    Workshops: Mass and Music

    Oct 20, 2011 | Blog

    The past week I've been involved with workshops, both preparing to give a session and attending several sessions. Next week I will be giving a morning session with Jason Cody, a teacher with Greater Saskatoon Catholic Schools. The topic is to be about the Mass and conversion. To help prepare, a podcast episode was recently dedicated to this topic. I also travelled to Saskatoon this past Friday to meet with Jason to plan things out a bit. Since I was near the construction of the new Holy Family Cathedral, I took some quick photos. Here is a neat one of the spiralling roofline and towering cross that goes up to about 170 feet. Photos don't really do this project justice, however. It is *huge* and is one of the largest things you notice when you enter the city from the north and east. To me, the soaring cross and roofline looks like a beacon to people who are searching for deeper meaning in their lives. (Don't worry - the scaffolding won't be there for long!) I was also in Humboldt this past week with many musicians from all over the diocese (as well as from my own parishes). We were attending workshops by Fr. Geoffrey Angeles and Bernadette Gasslein, who were presenting on music in the liturgy and on what the new changes in translation mean for the music. I studied in the seminary with Fr. Geoffrey, so it was cool to see him again and to catch up.

    Apples and Blackberries and iCloud! (Oh my!)

    Oct 13, 2011 | Blog

    Wow. Yesterday was a pretty big day for software updates if you use Apple products of any sort. Here are updates that I received: * iTunes 10.5 * OS X Lion version 10.7.2 * iOS version 5 for my iPad * an Apple TV update * The roll-out of iCloud, which is related to the above updates. In fact, there were so many updates and people trying to access them at once that Apple's mighty servers took a beating. It took a few tries before my iPad finally updated, but it's now working. I really like the updates to Safari on the iPad; it's much more slick opening several web pages at once. However, iCloud was not so smooth for me. It ended up messing up my ability to sync my calendar and address book with my Blackberry. (The Blackberry outage also affected me, but that was a separate issue.) Basically, if you use a Blackberry with your Mac, do not use iCloud for your calendar and address book until they fix this issue! I'm not sure where the blame lies, exactly, whether it's with RIM or Apple. Or both. I initially turned on iCloud because it looks like a very handy feature. Update my calendar on my Mac or iPad, and it uploads it to an Apple server which automatically updates my other devices. In theory. Unfortunately, this does not store the calendar on my Mac in a way that the Blackberry Desktop application can read it. So it all broke. And then to make matters worse, when I tried to revert the iCloud change, my calendar *disappeared* from iCal. Fortunately it did warn me ahead of time and so I was able to back up my calendar on my computer first. However, when I did the same thing on my iPad, it kept my calendar there. What's up with that? Surely if my iPad can keep my calendar, my Mac should be able to do the same thing? Silly Apple. It looks like they have a bit of work to do on iCloud... which looks really handy, once the bugs are worked out. And when I get an iPhone, this problem will be moot since I won't need to use the somewhat clunky Blackberry Desktop anyway. :-)