Rejoice! - the Final Sunday Mass (for the time being....)
This Sunday has a number of names: Dominica de rosa, or Rose Sunday, is one, when the clergy wear rose-coloured vestments in place of the Lenten purple. On this day, since 1096, the Pope has blessed and gifted a magnificent Golden Rose, usually to a Marian Shrine.
In England particularly, it has long been known as Mothering Sunday, a day of respite from the austerities of Lent, and traditionally a time of family reunions. The workers were given rare time off to return to their “mother church.” Their Golden Rose was a posie of wild flowers they might have picked on the way home to give to their mother.
The oldest name for today is derived from the first word of the Latin incipit of the Introit to the Mass, drawn from Isaiah 66.10: Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam … Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her.
Tragically, the newest name for today, for Anglicans in Victoria at least, will be something like “the Last Supper.” Due to the COVID-19 virus, today we celebrate the final public Mass at St Peter’s for the foreseeable future. In an Ad clerum I received from our Archbishop last night, he writes:
I am writing to you to ask that you advise members of your parish or other ministries that effective from Monday, 23 March 2020, regular public services and parish organised group activities are suspended within the Diocese of Melbourne.
The Archbishop Philip continues:
It is important to say, at the same time, that this is not a closure of ministry. The need for Christian ministry is only likely to be heightened over the [coming] weeks and months but it will need to happen in new forms. I hope that our churches can remain open for prayer and contemplation within the current restrictions but can imagine that further tightening of these restrictions may also close that option off. We are fortunate to have a range of digital opportunities open to us and more will be said [about that] in coming days … .
I feel a deep despair as I think of our beautiful church empty, with the doors closed to you, the people of St Peter’s; closed to the stranger, the visitor, the person seeking refuge. But it really comes as no surprise. Last week the Roman Catholic Church in Australia made the same decision, as did Brisbane and other Australian Dioceses; and some Anglican churches here in Melbourne had already made autonomous decisions to close. We are all seeing images of empty plazas in Italy, and watching the rising death toll there. Our government has closed the borders, and introduced strict social-distancing regulations. These are public health measures we have not seen since the polio epidemic in the 1950s, which killed more than 1,000 people in Australia.
Laetare Jerusalem: et conventum facite omnes qui diligitis eam … Rejoice, O Jerusalem: and come together all you that love her.
It is hard to say that word today: rejoice. But I’d like to share with you a story that Fr Don told us at Mass yesterday. It is a story you may well know, but it is a story worth retelling as we prepare for the dark times that lie ahead of us.
Martin Rinkart was born in 1586, and became a Lutheran pastor, serving the church in the city of Eisenberg, in Saxony, during the Thirty Years’ War. This small walled city became a refuge for displaced people fleeing the horrors of war. Refugees were welcomed to Eisenberg, but after a while the food ran out, and the people began to starve. With the starvation came pestilence and disease, almost the entire population of the city succumbed. At its height Pastor Rinkart would have as many as fifty funerals a day, burying his fellow clergy, and even his wife. One evening after having conducted funerals all day, he returned home, exhausted; he could not go on. It was from this place of despair that he wrote the most remarkable hymn:
Now thank we all our God
With heart and hands and voices,
Who wondrous things hath done,
In whom his world rejoices;
Who, from our mother’s arms
Hath blessed us on our way
With countless gifts of love,
And still is ours today.
I would like to close with a poem penned in the same spirit of faith, hope and love, by an Irish Roman Catholic religious Brother Richard Hendrick, just over a week ago, on Friday the 13th March. I’m not sure that I am there yet myself, if I am being honest, but as we look to a most uncertain future, with Pastor Rinkart and so many saints and faithful souls across the ages, these are words of beauty and hope.
Lockdown
Yes there is fear.
Yes there is isolation.
Yes there is panic buying.
Yes there is sickness.
Yes there is even death.
But,
They say that in Wuhan after so many years of noise
You can hear the birds again.
They say that after just a few weeks of quiet
The sky is no longer thick with fumes
But blue and grey and clear.
They say that in the streets of Assisi
People are singing to each other
across the empty squares,
keeping their windows open
so that those who are alone
may hear the sounds of family around them.
They say that a hotel in the West of Ireland
is offering free meals and delivery to the housebound.
Today a young woman I know
is busy spreading fliers with her number
through the neighbourhood,
so that the elders may have someone to call on.
Today Churches, Synagogues, Mosques and Temples
are preparing to welcome
and shelter the homeless, the sick, the weary.
All over the world people are slowing down and reflecting.
All over the world people are looking at their neighbours in a new way.
All over the world people are waking up to a new reality:
To how big we really are;
To how little control we really have;
To what really matters;
To Love.
So we pray and we remember that
Yes there is fear,
But there does not have to be hate.
Yes there is isolation,
But there does not have to be loneliness.
Yes there is panic buying,
But there does not have to be meanness.
Yes there is sickness,
But there does not have to be disease of the soul.
Yes there is even death,
But there can always be a rebirth of love.
Wake to the choices you make as to how to live now,
today, breathe.
Listen, behind the factory noises of your panic:
The birds are singing again;
The sky is clearing;
Spring is coming;
And we are always encompassed by Love.
Open the windows of your soul,
and though you may not be able
to touch across the empty square,
sing.