Few months back — feels like yesterday — I signed on as a reader of Holy Scripture at Holy Mass, and pleased I am having done so. Kept to myself, however, my ordination long, long ago, as a lector (reader), in the conventional batch of “minor ordinations” as acolyte, lector, exorcist, and porter.
Those were the days. Tradition still reigned. It happened in our Southern Indiana stronghold, before the Big Three — subdeacon, deacon, priest, one-two-three. Business-like. No whole year as a deacon, no. We Jesuits hadn’t time for that. Three years of theology, including moral in years one and two, making us ready to hear confessions, a third for more dogma, rubrics, and the like, and there we were, approved.
“Now go pray the mortal sin off your souls,” the drily humorous veteran Jesuit in charge of us in all things ritual announced in the sacristy after deacon ordination, which imposed our obligation to say the divine office, with priesthood coming the next day.
We’d been, most of us, 13 years in the making — one of us was 14 years, another 16, the first as a nonconformist of the first order, the other as an easy-going fellow, faithful to his calling, never quite on the mark in terms of achievement, eventually given his walking papers by superiors, I do not know why.
As for being a reader/lector in this Year of Our Lord, this is participation indeed, if for very few of us — a primary goal of liturgical reformers for a very long time. Come on gates, let’s participate.
So here I am, six decades years later, with 20 or so years of railing against the ersatz version of the mass foisted on us by 20th-century troublemakers, now a minister in it — of a sort.
Not quite, recovering as I am from years in a new-mass wilderness, fending off irritation, making odious comparisons between the Latin mass of my youth and this version, I have become a sort of turncoat.
This transition, a turn-around of say, 45 degrees, has been made possible largely by finding new-mass worshipers paying traditional-mass attention and then some to what’s going on up front, a polyglot, technicolored congregation whose attention and reverence is, ah, ministerial.
But how about this reading by volunteers? How does that work? Leaving myself out of it — won’t say nothin’ without a lawyer — except to note that for the past 15 or 20 years I have found myself surrounded by more and more people who do not speak clearly and loudly enough. Top of that, they sometimes get irritated when I say “what?”
Giving into rank prejudice in the matter, I have spent thousands which I got back according to refund rules and hundreds more which I donated to the cause, not to mention countless hours figuring out how to make things work — do not call them solutions — that effectively put the blame on Yours Truly. It’s like learning how to drive a car.
That said, use grain-of-salt business and listen up. Reading by volunteers at mass has been a mixed bag. What isn’t? All in all, kudos to them all, which does not mean I’ve nothing more to say. Except it does.
Blithe Spirit 