Looking to Lent: Ash Wednesday

Ash Wednesday is the usual name given to the First Day of Lent, the season during which the Church prepares to celebrate the Easter Triduum (Triduum: “Three Days” - Maundy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter Day).  More people, 2500, perhaps 3000, will be in our church this day to attend Mass or to receive ashes.  It is a day when the local parish has the single greatest opportunity to serve others in numbers.

Looking to Lent: Stations

This year we will be having Stations of the Cross every Friday night of Lent.  The service is from The Book of Occasional Services of the Episcopal Church.  The service itself consists of fourteen meditations related to the traditional events between Jesus’ condemnation before Pilate and the burial of his body in the tomb.  The words of the service are said.  Short verses of Stabat Mater are sung as the congregation moves between stations.  One hymn is sung at the end.  Because of the design of our church it is possible for the congregation and the clergy to process from station to station.

Presentation

The Feast of the Presentation of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Temple is the last of the cycle of  liturgical celebrations based on the infancy narratives of Matthew’s and Luke’s gospels.  Forty days after his birth, in accordance with the tradition of the time, Mary and Joseph bring the infant Jesus to the temple in Jerusalem.  There he is recognized as the “Light.”  Yet even those who recognize who he is and understand his future do not have faith until he rises from the dead.

Holy Week 2003

The Calendar of the Church Year and the regular services of the Church, the Holy Eucharist and Daily Morning and Evening Prayer, have ordered the common life of Saint Mary’s since the parish’s beginning.  Over time, of course, the schedule and range of services celebrated during the church year has evolved. 

Our Parish Life

I am writing to you on Thursday morning, the day I usually write the weekly newsletter.  Today is an ordinary weekday at Saint Mary’s.  Four weeks of very intensive celebrations are now behind us.  Because of the late date of Easter this year, there is something of a break between now and the first week of March.  (Ash Wednesday is March 5.)  The calendar will give us some time to complete tasks that it was simply not possible to complete as we prepared for the holidays, celebrated Christmas, Epiphany and the anniversary of the organ.

Never an Ordinary Time

When the calendars of the western liturgical churches were revised in the 1960s and 1970s, our Episcopal Church maintained the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas.  For Lutherans and Roman Catholics, the Christmas Season extends through this Sunday, the Feast of the Baptism of Christ.  For us, when the sun sets on Epiphany (again, for us, always January 6), we begin the “Season after the Epiphany.”  This season Roman Catholics call “Ordinary Time.” 

Music at Saint Mary’s

There are many reasons to celebrate music at Saint Mary’s this month.  It is the seventieth anniversary of our parish organ, an astounding and outstanding instrument.  Its design and execution at the beginning of the Great Depression was a central event in the history of our parish and in the history of American music.  It is one of the first of what are known as “great American classic organs.”  It was an experiment and building it required vision and faith, the kind of vision and faith for which this parish has stood since its birth.