Thomas, I am curious as to how the Catholic Liturgical year and mass would be different from my usual Anglican/Episcopalian one?
Let me detail the Liturgy for you ... I'll get it together and post.
but in our church it seems the only significant difference in service is that the Catholic one is spoken while the Episcopalian one is entirely sung/chanted.
We do the sung mass, too. I think the Orthodox even moreso. Again, it's a bit 'old school' ...
I would imagine in Roman Catholicism the Virgin gets more attention, which would be very interesting.
Not in the Liturgy. In the petitionary prayers we do ask that 'the Blessed Virgin, all the angels and saints, and you my brothers and sisters, pray for me to the Lord, our God' ... but then we believe that there's more present at Mass that the people.
Do Catholics believe that it is only necessary to be Christian (to believe in the saving grace of Christ) or that more is required before metanoia?
Good question, and worthy of a longer answer. Short answer is it is only necessary to believe in God's love ... in fact, we're much like the Moslem in that regard, who say that all one has to do to become a Moslem is declare oneself one.
In Catholicism the Gift of Grace is always there, but we have to accept it: no pre-destination, it's a free offer. Lip service doesn't cut it, however, you can't pull the wool over the Guv'nor's eyes! We have to love, if we want to be loved, that's the deal.
Metanoia is itself part of the gift — you make the effort, and the Holy Spirit matches (and often, to one's delight and surprise, surpasses) with His own. He does the work, He makes Christ known in us.
Hope that helps
Does someone have to be baptised as a Catholic to participate, or baptised as a Christian?
Baptism is a pre-requisite, and one can apply for a dispensation if not a Catholic. It's not common though.
We hold the Eucharist as a Mystery — something real is happening — there is Presence — if you don't believe that, then there's no point in engaging in the Mystery in the first place.
I'd find that offensive, but I'm tolerant of being offended.
Ditto.
I consider the Eucharist to be a very sacred act. For me, it approaches a mystical experience every time I take it. I tend to be picky about it though. What I mean is that I prefer the older way of doing Eucharist — that people confess their sins (we do that collectively in Episcopalianism) and that people approach the altar, kneel, and are fed the bread and wine.
Yup. Today we receive in the hand or on the tongue, but standing. Kneeling at the altar went out with Vatican II.
I don't think other ways of doing it are wrong, but rather that they don't give me the time I need to reflect on what I'm doing that makes the whole ritual meaningful.
Ah! Someone sensitive to symbol! It's another language really, a not-rationalistic one, very right-brain, I would say, far more encompassing and penetrative. Rationalism stops on the surface ... in symbolism, every surface is a veil ...
I've been to a lot of churches where stuff is just passed around, or people serve themselves off a table... it just isn't the same for me.
I'd walk out. Might as well stay home and get it mail-order.
It is too chaotic for me to have the time necessary to think about repentence, grace, and reconciliation.
Absolutely. If one can't invest oneself in something, how can one hope to get anything out of it?
I can't see why people couldn't just have Latin classes, as the Jews have Hebrew classes, and then the mass would be accessible.
It's a common assumption among those who don't know that the Mass is inaccessible if in Latin. Every Catholic knows what's going on, they're taught the Mass prior to first communion ... then, of course, there's the richness of symbolism that surrounds them.
I like the Latin Mass. I like the sung Latin more. I like the vernacular mass because I can ponder particular words (and lose my place in the mass!). My only problem with the Mass in English is the language is so bland! They should have done a translation, then given it to a poet or a lyricist or someone...
I recognize most people do not tend to have a great patience for symbolic act.
I seriously believe it's a language we lost, when we moved off the land, as it were. From the moment we started living in cities, we started constructing ivory towers. I think this process has accelerated dramatically with the advent of the Enlightenment (which poo-poo'd symbology) and industrialisation. Now we 'invent', having lost touch with the past. Even the New Age looks not much further back than the Romance movement for its symbolic meaning, and they were already in deep trouble.
I'm odd because I love symbols and I don't really need to intellectually grasp what is going on to find meaning in ritual.
Symbol is my 'big thing' ... once you rationalise a symbol, it ceases to be a symbol, and becomes a sign. That, in essence, is my beef with modern Christian movements, and why I'm so into first millennium Christianity — it's the language they spoke, and it's as clear as day to me.
You can't rationalise a Mystery without losing sight of it.
But you speak it too! You'll get more out of your year, wherever you are, than I might have first thought.
The whole idea is that if you hang around long enough, even the most strange people will feel more like family and you'll "get it."
When I learnt classical martial arts, that's the way we were taught. It was rarely explained, it was shown, and you copy ... this idea horrifies the modern mind that assumes nothing is inaccessible to it, as if it had a right to all knowledge, no, that's unfair ... it assumes that an answer to a question will suffice, as if by knowing the answer, you've embodied it ...
(I saw a book on koans once, with a koan, and then the 'answer', and then the next koan, as if you could work through it like a manual! As if knowing the answer would trigger the 'breakthrough' ... Lord help us ... )
So you copy and you study ... and then it happens, and you get it, and the sensei looks across the dojo, and grins, and nods, and next time he shows you the same thing he's shown you a hundred times before, but it's a whole different ballgame!
I asked my sensei once, if 'the first thing you learn is the last thing you understand', what does the sensei look for when one performs a technique: "In a young man, virility; ten years later, proficiency; ten years later, maturity; ten years later, timing; another ten, economy; ten years later, insight; ten years later, wisdom."
Same move, every time.
I listened awestruck to Taj Mahal playing 'Dust My Broom' once ... it's not what he played, it's what he didn't ... I've never heard anything played so minimally, and be so absolutely right in what it was about ... it was like a comet ... almost nothing there at all, but it was incandescent.
There's a bit in Thomas Merton somewhere when he talks about catching another man's eye, he's a monk and the other guy's a Sufi, or a Buddhist, or whatever. The thing that hit Merton was he saw in the other something he knew in himself ... that thing you looked for, that you'd touched it, couldn't quite hold on to it, but you knew it was there, and you'd touched it.
They nodded. 'nuff said.
Pax tecum,
Thomas
