When I was fourteen years old, there was nothing I wanted more to do on Sunday morning than to ditch church and stay home to watch television or listen to the top 40 music countdown on the radio. Now on Sunday morning I am barely able to juggle the overlapping live streams from churches around North America that I would watch.
Among its many effects, good and bad, the shutdown has produced a golden age for the live streaming of church services. I have wanted to take advantage of this situation, as it will not last forever, and so in my curiosity and obsession, Sunday morning has blossomed into a routine of church that lasts almost six hours from early morning until almost noon. It sounds like a lot of time, but that's less time than I would have spent watching football or classic movies in the past. It goes by quickly.
For most of the Youtube live content I consume---news and entertainment commentary---I don't care if I watch it recorded after the fact. But for church, I prefer greatly to watch it live. Because so many Christian churches have been live streaming lately, Sunday morning is like a banquet laden with too many items to possibly sample. The streams overlap and conflict in time. I'm not complaining at all.
This week I woke up late, not getting out of bed until past 5:30. It gave me just enough time to grab my iPad and go out to the porch. I didn't even have time to say the Rosary.
It was already warm outside. It would be a hot day. Soon I would have to turn on the fan to stay comfortable, but for now I could enjoy the peace..
The Youtube app on my iPad had fresh notifications, as it always does in the morning. I scrolled to select from among them one of early-morning church services from the channels in my subscriptions.
I make a priority of watching at least one traditional Latin mass during Sunday morning. In the last several months I've followed along regularly using the reprint of the Latin missal that I bought on Amazon last September before I went to.a Latin mass in downtown Phoenix (where I discovered everyone uses the same one I had bought). At the time I went looking for recorded Latin masses online, as I wanted to become familiar with the sections. Within a few months it became much easier to do this, because of the shutdown.
Even with a missal, however, it is not easy to follow the old rite, unless you know what is going on, because many of the words are spoken almost silently by the priest while facing away from the congregation, sometimes while a hymn is being sung.
Nevertheless, in the last few months I've become familiar with most of the old rite, memorizing the opening lines of various sections. I can usually recognize where we are at any given point. My Latin professor in college in the Eighties was a former priest, and I've come to recognize many of the examples he used in our tutorials to illustrate vocabulary and grammar, pulling them off the top of his head from memory. I can still remember him saying, as a way of illustrating of the future tense, lavabo inter innocentes (I shall wash my hands among the innocents).
Most people who aren't Catholic wouldn't know that in some ways, despite it being one organization headed by one man, the Catholic Church is like many mini-denominations under one umbrella. Hence the wide variety of types of masses, performed by different orders of priests within the Church. Each bishop is somewhat independent, having wide autonomy as to what happens in his particular diocese. Nevertheless, a priest is a priest, and a mass is a mass.
Most Catholics my age or younger have never experienced the old rite, since it was effectively banned after 1965, only being reinstated by Benedict XVI. There are more than a few Catholics, including many bishops, who think it ought to be re-banned, even though it is probably the only segment of the Church undergoing rapid growth in the western world. Probably that's exactly why they want it banned again. It has gone from being a tiny subculture to being a threat of some kind.
Yesterday I had gotten up just in time to catch just the tail end of the Latin mass streamed by St. Mary of Pine Bluff, a parish just outside Madison, Wisconsin. Usually I don't mind if I miss this early stream from St. Mary, because for now at least, there are other Latin masses streamed later in the morning from different churches that I can watch. Still I like to experience part of as many of them as possible.
Then at a quarter to six exactly, I used my iPad to bring up the live stream that was just beginning from St. Mark Church in Boca Raton, Florida. It is a large Greek Orthodox church, no doubt serving as the focus of the Greek community there, as Orthodox churches do for various nationalities in North America.
Like the other churches of all denominations, St. Mark been empty lately except for the priests and chanters, because of restrictions from the shutdown. In the last few weeks parishioners have been allowed back, wearing masks and standing the required distance apart from each other in the pews. The priest has to direct the manner in which communion and the blessed bread loaves can be received at the end of the service while complying with health restrictions.
The live stream from St. Mark Church is well produced, and includes multiple cameras that switch from one angle to another as different people chant portions of the liturgy, taking over from each other as they perform the Divine Liturgy of John of Chrysostom, an ancient rite that goes back to the Byzantine Empire. They even have a camera behind the screen, showing action that is usually not visible to the congregation.
The liturgy lasts for several hours and is sung in a mixture English and Greek. It's a delight when I am able to recognize a particular Greek prayer I've memorized, or an entire new Greek sentence from the familiar words in it. I like how the priest in the Orthodox church, after announcing the Gospel, sings (in English) let us be attentive in an ecclesiastic rhythm you might hear in a monastery.
As you might know, the liturgical calendars of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches have differed by a week from each other dating back to 1582, when the western church dropped 11 days from the Gregorian calendar. Thus in the eastern churches, the various feasts such Easter and Pentecost generally happen a week after the corresponding Catholic (and Protestant) celebrations. If one can straddle the schism, one can enjoy an extended celebration of various festivals in the church calendar. This is addition to the fact that traditional Catholic churches often still celebrate Pentecost and other festivals as eight-day octaves. Most of these octaves have been removed in the post-1965 Catholic Church, with only three remaining.
Shortly after St. Mark's begins, another Greek Orthodox church, Holy Transfiguration Church in Marietta, Georgia begins their own live stream of the same ritual. The streams are very similar, and I sometimes confuse them, although lately I've come to recognize the priests in the two churches.
I have to pick one to follow---yesterday it was St. Mark. One of the well-known features of Orthodox services is that because they are so long, and because attendees are supposed to stand during much of it (with much action taking place behind the screen), by tradition lay people are allowed to come and go during the long ritual, taking extended breaks and coming back in to the pews without judgment. Thus at home I don't feel bad about switching the feeds, or when I want to make coffee or have breakfast.
At seven o'clock exactly, I took a break from the long Greek Orthodox streams to catch the livestream of the mass celebrated by Father Mike Schmitz, the Catholic chaplain at the Newman Center at the University of Minnesota--Duluth. His is a Novus Ordo mass (post Vatican II in 1965), performed in English, and much less formal than the Latin mass. It is live streamed from the small campus chapel with a simple altar. The live stream has a home-made intimate feel as he faces the camera speaking directly to the viewers. College students do the Gospel and Epistle readings. Following Church guidelines during the shutdown, while Eucharist is being passed out, they put a graphic of this prayer on screen, which one can recite along the college student saying it, in order to make a spiritual communion in place of physically receiving the body and blood of Christ.
As a priest, Father Mike is a charismatic preacher--very friendly and approachable. For years he has been producing regular recorded videos on the Ascension Presents channel on Youtube, speaking on a variety of Catholic and Christian topics. I was a big fan of him even before the shutdown. We watch these recorded videos sometimes in the evening as part of our wind-down after the news.
This morning---the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time, according to the Church calendar---was sad for several reasons. As Father Mike had been warning for several weeks, the live streams from the campus chapel were meant only to be temporary. They had already gone longer than they thought they would. Unless shutdown restrictions were reimposed, this week's mass is one was to be the last one to be live streamed this way from the campus chapel. For the rest of the summer he would traveling through the diocese.
No matter what type of mass they perform, all Catholic churches around the world follow the same schedule of Scripture readings day after day. It is interesting to see different priests give sermons on the same Gospel passage on the same day.
This morning the Gospel was the passage in Matthew where Christ tells the disciples that they must love him more than they love even their own father and mother. Looking into the video camera, Father Mike said that although it is Faith that allows you to go forward confident of salvation, what truly transforms you is love of God---above your love for all other things in your life, including your possessions, your family, and even your children.
Then in the midst of talking about this, he said that this past week he had visited his own mother. He is a from a family of six children. His mother had just received a diagnosis of fatal pancreatic cancer. He described her strength and faith in accepting this situation. As he did so, he was clearly fighting back his own tears on camera.
It was heartbreaking, especially because this week's mass from UMD was the last one I'll probably see from him, unless I go to Minnesota. He mentioned his homilies from various parishes in his diocese would be available on iTunes and Youtube, as they have been. But it will not be the same as seeing them live.
At the end of Father Mike's mass, I switched back to St. Mark in Boca Ratonvto see end of the long ritual, and then watched some of the Holy Transformation stream as well. After that there was a lull in the morning's schedule from until past nine. I used this time to listen casually to part of the live stream from Sourp Kevork Armenian Orthodox church in the suburbs of Montreal, one of two Armenian streams going on at the same time.
As I learned form Google, Sourp Kevork translates in English to St. George. The ritual in the small church there is entirely in the Armenian language, even the sermons, and thus I can't understand a word, although I intend to learn the Lord's Prayer in that language. Nevertheless I find the ritual beautiful, especially the organ music, which is haunting and distinctive in a way that is evokes the ancient eastern edge of Christendom.
At nine-thirty, having usually eaten breakfast, I came back outside to wait for the start of the traditional Latin mass stream from St. Joan of Arc in Post Falls, Idaho, in the panhandle just across the border from Spokane This has been the Latin mass that I try to watch in its entirety. Their stream is among the least sophisticated of the online operations, clearly initiated because of the exigencies of the health emergency. Sometimes the sound fails, or the feed cuts out in the middle and they have to restart it on a new stream.
I say that I try to watch it, because last week their stream never started. I was worried they had ceased streaming it altogether, but it turns out it was just technical difficulties. Nevertheless, when, in his post-sermon announcements, Father Rapoport mentioned that they would continue their live streaming for now, as the Governor of Idaho had just extended various shutdown rules, I knew the handwriting was on the wall, as they say in the Good Book.
I watched this stream until the very end, after the priest dismisses the congregation with the ancient words "Ite, missa est," from which the word mass comes from. Then after the last prayers, the celebrants file out, and altar boys in white boys return to remove the missal from the altar. The stream continues playing until only the altar is shown.
When it was finally over, I immediately closed Youtube and brought up the Grace FM app on my iPad to listen to the last part of the broadcast from Calvary Church in Aurora, Colorado. They've been doing this for years, long before the shutdown. It's a very abrupt switch from the Latin mass, to be sure.
Except for a Lutheran minister whose recorded Bible lessons I sometimes listen to during the week, Pastor Ed at Calvary Church is my last solid foot in online Protestantism. No matter how deeply I get into traditional Christian rituals, I don't think I could ever abandon Calvary Chapel, as it was in no small way because of Pastor Ed and Grace FM that about nine years ago, during a deep spiritual crisis in my life, I found my way back to Christ. Probably this means I can never be Catholic.
Of course, as Evangelicals, they don't follow any liturgical calendar in the same way Catholic, Orthodox, and even some mainline Protestant churches do, not even coordinating with other churches with which they are affiliated. Each pastor makes his own schedule.
This last part is actually the very crux of what separates Catholicism from Protestantism. More than any particular point of of Luther's theology, or criticisms he had of the Church at the time (some of which the Church has long conceded as having been legitimate), the Catholic view is that the fundamental error Luther introduced in 1517 was the concept that any man could read the Bible and interpret it in accordance with the message of Christ, instead of learning it through the guidance of tradition going person-to-person back to Jesus himself. In the United States, most non-Christians, and even many Christians, do not realize just how Protestant is the idea that one can simply open up the Bible and start reading it without getting it all wrong.
The Protestants of course have a reply to this. I do not wish to get into the debate, only to mention that it exists.
Thus despite all the other streams I watch, I can still find joy in listening to Pastor Ed's lessons in the Word, going through Bible verse by verse, even as I find myself comparing his commentary to what the Catholic and Orthodox interpretation might be. I don't want to get too fuzzy and ecumenical, or assert too much heresy about how everything you do is cool with God, so long as you're a good person, but I'm pretty sure Pastor Ed and I agree on the important things.
I owe him much. God used him to bring me back to Christ, as he has done for others. How could I not appreciate this for the rest of my life? He is among the folks I retweet on Twitter, no doubt irking the Catholics who follow me. He and I would get along, if we talked with other, even if he wouldn't be on board with my devotion to the Rosary and other points of Mariology. I've come to understand many of the misconceptions folks have about the Catholic Church. As I've said, at heart I'm still a still a typical Episcopalian after all these years.
Dominus vobiscum.
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