WHY is Mass-going so personally challenging and difficult to confront weekly?
Boredom is a common answer. Less common is that it would be just and right if we were worried about attending Mass because we felt unable to live up to the demands encased in the rituals.
The sharing of table implies profound trust and honour and relationship. To share a meal was to establish or perpetuate a relationship.
For Christians this meant binding oneself to others through a bond to Jesus, his message and his fate.
A sign of peace in the public domain of civic life in Jesus day could only involve an exchange between those of the same gender if there was no family blood relationship.
Therefore the Christian practice of a general and boundary-free exchange of greeting at the public Eucharist meal carried the profound meaning that all participants regarded themselves as bound as tightly as if bound to a blood relative.
We must overcome the cult of the individual. We must accept that attending Mass together is not merely an aggregation of individual worshippers who happen to be in the church building at the same time.
We must accept that the Mass moves beyond a mere social ritual.
Our natural proclivity is to recoil from the demands of the Gospel. St Mark’s gospel takes 16 chapters to tell and retell how the death and resurrection of Jesus is the measure of our fate in seeking to build a civic life.
Both a Latin Mass and a vernacular Mass with minister and congregation facing one another create a window where the Lord can be more easily imagined.
Polyphony or up-tempo music can be a help. However it is the desperate and humble search that prevents boredom and gives us the courage to go again next Sunday.
Vince Hodge
Paddington, Qld
