After my Pastor’s Desk last week, and my use of the term “trans” to describe parishes, parishioners, and priests, several people got in touch.
Some asked why I used the word “trans” given its contemporary use and meaning, others asked me what’s the alternative model to the established parish and several asked about my notion of community.
Trans to Transitus
The contemporary use of the word “trans” is a Zeitgeist issue. It is disruptive and calls into question established constructs of meaning. As always, one person’s need is met while another’s is not.
Transitus is a keyword for us Christians. The transitus through the waters of the Red (Reed) Sea and the waters of baptism are symbolic of the deeper transition we make (the journey of change) from the “old self” to the new person redeemed in Christ.
This is not a shallow experience, like dipping your toes in the sea. It is an immersive experience, like being pulled beneath the waves by the power of the sea itself.
Transition is an immersive experience. It is an experience of limit, of hope and of fear because one does not know where the experience will end, or if one can control it.
What’s an Alternative Model
The established parish model is not a bad one, it’s just not suited to a missionary country and diocese.
In the same way, the established Roman Missal is not a bad ritual, but in many places, its ritual form is not achievable.
The Mass presumes the voices of the presider, deacon, lector, cantor, choir, and congregation. All possible in a large urban parish but not always in a small country one.
The Missal understands that liturgy is more than just going through the motions, holding the fort, or doing what we have always done.
Consequently, the rubrics offer the following directions: in these or similar words; and in this way or according to local custom. This is not “straight-jacket” thinking, but an invitation to adaptation.
An alternative parish model would take its cue from the Church’s liturgical theology.
It would be capable of adapting to the signs of the times and it would also hold the principle of active and conscious participation as primary.
Adaption and full, conscious, and active participation, applied first to a parish’s liturgical life and subsequently to its pastoral life would give us a new paradigm of the parish.
Together, adaptation and active participation can move the construction of the parish from being a delivery mechanism of parish products to pastoral consumers to being a place of where worship and praise are the springboard for Gospel and sacramental outreach to all who need it beyond the parish walls.
Notion of Community
Back in the 1980s and 1990s when the New Zealand Church had a thriving intellectual life (sadly this is long since gone) and many of the best theologians and scripture scholars taught here, I remember the late Prof. Mark Searle comment that we (parishioners and believers) are “a community of strangers”. He elucidated: we are often not known to each other; we stand and worship with people we don’t know well or even at all.
We are all strangers to each other because we do not intimately know each other’s souls. We cannot presume to know the other person’s soul; we can only respect it.
In a community of strangers, each person must make and hold space for another.
The Church is not a club or a clique of friends; it is a community of strangers who know themselves to be outsiders and therefore welcome everyone to “come as they are”, a stranger. Where cliques rule, the “community” is exclusive.
A community of strangers is positive because it stops us all from becoming people possessive of parishes, priests, systems, buildings and more. Often possessive communities seek to possess “the thing” that gives them meaning or purpose and become “hell-bent” on defending their right to “the thing” even at the cost of real growth or transitus.
Change
We are in a place of movement or trans-ition; we are between identities, between the established, the disestablished and yet to be re-established.
Two ideas occur to me concerning change and its dynamic in parish life: for nothing to change there must be change and its contrast, for change to be deep and permanent, nothing should be permitted to change.
Fr Joe
