Anticipated Palm Sunday...

This is the most depressing time of year. Not only because of this silly annual ritual of changing the clocks, which gives me a form of jetlag, but because of the omnipresence of bastardised liturgy. I remember 13 years ago standing at a railway station in the middle of nowhere. It was about 7:30am and I was changing trains because I was on my way to a far flung Palm Sunday procession to witness ceremonies and prayers that had been suppressed in the 1950's. I can't remember why I wasn't going to Blackfen, just a 17 minute walk from my house, but I imagine it was some dissatisfaction with the previous year's service. The parish priest had invited a cantor from Maiden Lane, because the parish choir either couldn't read Gregorian notation or found the antiphons too complicated, and this person had decided to intersperse Pacelli psalms into the procession. That, along with a host of unruly boys in cottas which made the procession look most unseemly, was why I decided to go to Clapham Park which was much better. Looking back I can't help but wonder why I bothered. I suppose that is the nature either of trauma or maturity.

Someone wrote to me about my previous post and asked if my hatred for the Roman Rite was really as profound as I had let on. The short answer is yes but I do have a soft spot for the liturgy for Palm Sunday. There's a certain elegance and fluidity to it. I suppose looking at it clinically I would not include the Passion narrative (a later development) but it is very moving to hear the Gospel narrated in its proper context, having in a sense re-enacted the narrative itself in the Procession. Nowadays I think I might come out of retirement and go to a High Mass for Palm Sunday, so long as the proper conditions were met (no Pacelli psalms, Deacon and Subdeacon, three separate Deacons for the Passion, &c). Then again I doubt I would rise from my bed at 5am to witness such a thing. I think the Imperial Russian "donkey walk" would be far more impressive!