Inside ML

“One Sunday Mass each week cannot carry the full weight of our need for prayer,” writes Paige Byrne Shortal. “Even so, the hour on Sunday is often all that people will give or can give” (see article starting on page 16). So then, what do we do when so many diverse members of our communities come expecting that one hour to meet all their devotional and communal needs? What’s missing from our liturgies?

Perhaps we need to recover a sense of the “danger” in liturgy. MaryEllen O’Brien reminds us that the Stowe Missal referred to the eucharistic prayer, and in particular the consecration, as the “Most Dangerous Prayer” (see article starting on page 9). Bread and wine changing to Body and Blood is a dangerous thing — dangerous to the status quo, dangerous to the way we’ve always done things, dangerous to our safe, secure images of what we think it means to be Christians. But then again, maybe not.

Mary Testin speaks for us all when she says that in her experience the eucharistic prayer is seldom prayed (page 40). It is more often read — usually at a racehorse clip. If every community could take seriously Testin’s suggestions for drawing the assembly into “the great paschal mystery” we celebrate, perhaps we wouldn’t be missing what we shouldn’t be missing in the liturgy.

Language defines reality at times. Rufino Zaragoza, OFM, observes that church workshops and conferences with “multicultural” seem to attract participants of color but not those of the dominant Euro-American culture. Read his article, “Redefining Multicultural Liturgy: Seeking a Language of Reciprocity,” beginning on page 5, for some suggestions on how to bridge the ethnic-culture gap that can exist in parishes and dioceses.

Newly noted

ML welcomes Brenda Soboleski in this issue. Brenda is the new author of “Musical Liturgy” in the Planning Guide. She is the director of music ministry at St. Clare of Assisi Parish in the Archdiocese of St. Louis. See what she has to say, starting on page 29. ML

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