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| Looking back at where we've been. |
Living so close to the nation’s capital and engulfed as we are by people who fixate on its every palpitation, we know many politically-minded folk who track time in four-year cycles. Baseball people, it seems to me, understand time in a two-year paradigm: This Year, and Next Year. Next Year seems already to be getting some interest from Nats fans.
But for us who live and breathe the calendar of the Liturgy of the Church, time unfolds in a three-year frame: A, B, and C, or more poignantly, Matthew, Mark, and Luke, for the Gospels that anchor the Sunday Mass lectionary readings. As you’ve noticed, we are in Year A, Saint Matthew, which should tip you off that this Palm Sunday we will have the longest setting of the Passion.
Also every three years, on the third, fourth, and fifth Sundays of Lent, we have special catechetical Gospels, all taken from the Gospel of John. As you might guess, “special” also means “really long.” For centuries in the Church of Rome, these Gospels were read at Masses at which catechumens were in proximate preparation for admission to the Christian Mysteries, the Sacraments of Initiation: Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Communion. These Masses occurred at designated major churches in Rome, on Wednesdays of Lent. Wednesday was the other day of fasting and penance, along with Friday. Because by the mid-20th century, this penitential aspect of Wednesdays had disappeared from common culture, if not yet from the liturgy, the reformers of the Missal after Vatican II moved these vital passages to the Sunday lectionary, in Year A. The Samaritan Woman at the Well (3rd Lent); The Man Born Blind (4th Lent); and The Raising of Lazarus (5th Lent) are all powerful revelations of Jesus’ identity and call. Now we all get to hear them on Sunday, every three years -- and they are optional for the other years.
But, you may say, but I don’t remember those readings. No shame there – you haven’t heard them since 2017, SIX years ago, because 3rd, 4th, and 5th Lent are The Masses that Were Not back in 2020.
Because of the three-year cycle, I always pull up the intercessions from three years previous in preparing the new ones. Last week I noticed that in my 2020 file, there were intercessions for Ash Wednesday, 1st Lent, 2nd Lent, and then…nothing. 3rd Lent 2020 is The Weekend the World Stopped. The governor made his decree on Thursday, and it went into effect on noon Saturday. I was so moved to see the triple-sized crowd at Saturday morning Mass that day, as people came for a farewell Communion.
On the other side of campus, our teachers had a professional development day scheduled for that Friday. Whatever they had planned on professionally developing, they ditched; and instead coolly, quickly, and professionally developed everything they needed to move all instruction online for the coming “two weeks to flatten the curve.” (Remember that?!) On that Monday morning, our school was ‘live’ online for all of our kids. The county-run schools required about a month to begin remote instruction. So much for two weeks!
I do have intercessions from Palm Sunday 2020; that was the first Mass we live-streamed, once we realized the whole two-week thing was a decoy. It would be three and a half months before we were allowed back in church – late June, and over a month after the rest of Maryland was so permitted. That was awful, and it did damage to souls that is fully known only to God – but the rest of us can discern enough to make a good guess.
Being liturgically oriented means having a natural cycle of three years as part of our frame of mind and of time. Three years later, walking again through each day and each step of that disaster gives me clear eyes to look at what stands before me now, and what lies ahead in years to come. I want to promise that never, ever again will I collude in the privation of the People of God of the Holy Sacraments and Divine Worship. As with the very Faith entrusted to us, what fills me with resolve as well as confidence in God’s help with this project, is looking back.
Monsignor Smith
