Grassroots Liturgist

I am going to tell you three little stories, all true. At my University Chaplaincy, there was a library that doubled as a dining room, particularly on formal occasions.   There was a lovely old Victorian dining table with brass castors on the legs.   One evening, as several of us were gathered for dinner, one of those casters gave way.   Some of us desperately held up the heavy table as our chaplain told the other students to get something to prop up the leg.   They ran back with a book – a copy of the Holy Bible!! “NOT THE BIBLE!” exclaimed the incredulous chaplain. Compare that to an interview with Salman Rushdie that I saw many years ago.   He described how in his family, all books – not just Scripture – were so revered that if one fell to the floor, they were taught to pick it up, kiss it, and put it back in its place. One final anecdote: some months ago, my father died.   As I trawled through his stuff, I came across the last bus pass of his mo...

Languages and translation are more complex than we might imagine. We all know how the English of Shakespeare, who was writing over 400 years ago, is so very different to the English that we use today.   Go back another 200 years to the second half of the 14 th Century, and the vast majority of us simply wouldn’t understand Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in the original Middle English. When abroad, have you ever seen signs that have been translated into English for the tourists, but done so poorly and maybe with unintended comical results? Or try this: type an English sentence into an app to get a Spanish translation; then take that translation and translate it into German; and then take that translation and translate it back into English.   The likelihood is that you will not have the same sentence as you started with, and it may have turned out to be very different. One more anecdote…modern Mexicans have a saying: “The donkey talking about ears.”   It’s a cultural i...

This seems an appropriate point at which to explore the Lectionary, of which we start using a new edition on the 1st Sunday of Advent later this year. The Second Vatican Council reminds us that we are fed from two tables in the Holy Mass: Word and Sacrament. “The treasures of the Bible are to be opened up more lavishly, so that richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God's word.   In this way a more representative portion of the holy scriptures will be read to the people in the course of a prescribed number of years.” (Sacrosanctum Concilium 51) For too long, the Church didn’t provide its flock with a great deal of nourishment from Scripture in the Mass.   The Council Fathers sought to correct that, which led the introduction of the 1969 Lectionary – the   book which contains all the Readings that are proclaimed during the Liturgy of the Word.   On any given Sunday, at every Catholic church in every country of the world, we listen to the same...