I’m sure there’s a technical term for how the viewer separates the artwork from the background. I love taking creche photos in part because the background is so often completely inappropriate, and occasionally accidentally appropriate. Here, NO TRESPASSING and BEWARE OF THE DOG are a “No room at the inn” for our time.

Christmas morning, I vowed to my little brother that any time I see a celebrity in a setting where greeting that celebrity is at all appropriate, I will greet that celebrity. (Stories like “I could have talked with Stephen Hawking this one time” or “I could have talked with Ted Turner this one time” are nothing but frustrating.) And who was at Christmas mass but Michael “Catholic Anarchy” Iafrate. I’m still not sure how two anarchist-sympathizing Catholic bloggers emerged from the same generation in a single West Virginian parish, much less how they did this without meeting before. Well, I greeted him, and now we have met.

At this parish, they’re adjusting to the changes in the mass with elegant pew cards from the hilariously-named AndWithYourSpirit.com. (“And with your spirit” being the phrase nobody remembers to say.)

My most memorable mass this Advent was one Saturday at dusk at St. Andrew’s in Worcester, when there was a local power outage. Below, the lector reads with the aid of a pen light. As you would expect, much was made of “waiting for light in darkness.”

2011 overall was an amazing year in my spiritual life, but Advent was a time of stress and distraction. One last thing I should have blogged earlier was Christmas caroling with the Catholic Worker community. This year, 25 of us visited nursing homes, Christmas parties, and unsuspecting neighbors.

Mike: Bruce, did you see that joke on the whiteboard? “What did one angel say to the other angel?” “HALO THERE!”

Bruce: Ha ha ha!

Justin (ten seconds later): Bruce, did you see that joke on the whiteboard?

Bruce: Yeah. It went over my head.

Most churches stand out. St. Columba’s is hidden. Attending church there was like going to a house mass—nobody walking past suspects you’re going to a sacred gathering.

(Best wishes to the bride and groom—your lovely wedding is an auspicious start to your lives together.)

I attended Palm Sunday mass at Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Oxford’s Blackbird Leys neighborhood. The church had such a large congregation, and such a narrow door, that I actually had to stand in line to enter.

Pictured: Re-entering Sacred Heart after the outdoor blessing of palms.

As a teen lector, Palm Sunday was The Show, the big mass, full of quick glances from Father Ed Bell that said, “Don’t screw this up, kid.” This mass at Sacred Heart was quite the opposite, relaxed and occasionally chaotic.

I was back at St. Peter’s, my home parish, for Holy Thursday mass. Each parish only has one mass on this day. For a multicultural parish like ours, this means celebrating that diversity by including as many languages and musical traditions as possible in the service. One year I counted 14 languages on Holy Thursday at St. Peter’s. This year, I think there were 8.

I mentioned on the 508 show that St. Peter’s had a good conversation about race a few weeks back, and that the measure of such a conversation is not the quality of that conversation, but what comes from it. For his Holy Thursday homily, Msgr. Scollen described some of the race conversation for those who weren’t there, and outlined the steps to our becoming a “beloved community.” Holy Thursday mass is also marked by a large-scale and literal washing of each other’s feet mid-way through the service, so the topic of building friendships and serving each other could not have been more fitting. I was not the only parishioner very happy to see this follow-through on “the beloved community,” and I hope I have many excuses in the coming months to blog more about how people are making that happen.

זאָג כאָטש להבֿדיל

Zack Berger’s new book of English and Yiddish poetry, Not in the Same Breath, is out.

Scott in Afghanistan

Worcester Magazine profiled of Scott Schaeffer-Duffy, who’s just returned from Afghanistan, where he was meeting with youth committed to building peace.

Nonviolent Solutions

If you want to catch up with Worcester’s Center for Nonviolent Solutions, Brian Goslow published a profile of the group in, of all places, Fifty Plus Advocate.

Forming Habits

My Lenten habits went OK this year. Could have been better, could have been worse. It’s not that my Lenten vows are so strenuous—it’s that forming new habits of any kind is tough for me.

Leo “Zen Habits” Babauta, one of the more useful sources of info on habit-building, is putting together an online Habit Course, and I’m lucky to be one of the beta testers. I’ll let you know how it goes, and how the course stacks up.

“Song for Holy Saturday”

Following tradition, here’s a link to this poem by James K. Baxter.

My favorite Holy Week post

Andrew Sullivan says Yes:

Does a force exist that is behind everything we are and see and know? Is that force benign? Does that force love us? Was the only way that truth could be revealed was by God becoming man and sacrificing himself to show us the only way to save ourselves?

Today, at the invitation of a friend of a friend, I went to worship with the Salvation Army in the Kibera neighborhood.

We began by marching with their brass band along the dirt alleys. This was the first time I saw an actual Salvation Army marching band, which I always throught of as outmoded Victoriana. It was pretty fantastic—the music was so loud and persuasive that many bystanders marched in place as the band passed.

The terrain was surprisingly foreign to me, and I started following exactly in the footsteps of the person in front of me. All my instincts of walking on pavement or cross-country were wrong when it came to walking on rough ground and garbage, negotiating the drainages, children, chickens, and carts of jerry-cans in an efficient way.

They stopped at an intersection and there was an “open air meeting” church service, with songs, prayers, and testimony. Several church members, rightly guessing that I had no idea where I was or what was going on, stood next to me and provided a running translation of the Swahili service into English.

After about half an hour, we marched to the church building for the “holiness meeting,” a famliliar evangelical service. There were several dance numbers by children or young adults.

The Salvationists were wonderful hosts, welcoming without any pushy proselytizing. I’ll have to get to know the Salvation Army community in Worcester a little better.

Kibera is the largest slum in Nairobi, with about the population of Worcester.

I covet, but do not own, this calendar.

Last night I stopped by the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Nairobi a few hours before Christmas mass, which I considered attending but was warned off from by a couple non-Amharic-speakers.

Here’s a photo of the inside I took at the urging of a member of the congregation. The painting of the three bearded men depicts the Trinity. I was told that the TV screen, though not working at present, is intended to give people a view of what’s happening in the inner sanctuary when the curtain is closed.

I love watching people showing up for Ethiopian mass, the women in white packed into cars, emerging like circus clowns turning into butterflies.

My Ethiopian Orthodox Christmas highlight was baking a loaf of injera, using an electric mitad.

Interesting fact: The word “Tewahedo,” according to Wikipedia, refers to a doctrinal difference I did not know of. “This word refers to the Oriental Orthodox belief in the one single unified Nature of Christ; i.e., a belief that a complete, natural union of the Divine and Human Natures into One is self-evident in order to accomplish the divine salvation of humankind, as opposed to the ‘two Natures of Christ’ belief (unmixed, but unseparated Divine and Human Natures, called the Hypostatic Union) promoted by today’s Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches.”

The unprogrammed worship didn’t go very long, so we walked over to another building where they hold, you guessed it, “programmed worship.” I had no idea such a thing existed. It’s similar to an evangelical service. (Though on the tamer side.)

One more surprising fact: Kenya has the most Quakers of any nation. I am told that the Ngong Road congregation is mostly Luhya.

We celebrated the Feast of the Holy Family at St. Austin’s Parish in Nairobi, Kenya, where the church was packed, the music lovely, and the homily namechecked Facebook.

No photographs of the church, I’m sorry to say, but continuing my long-running “quirky creche” series, here are a couple of nativity scenes that caught my eye this week.

The household nativity scene above is pretty standard, except for the Godzilla-sized sheep lurking behind it. “You should see the shepherds….”"

This one is at the Mwangaza Jesuit Centre. There are several pieces of fantastic religious sculpture there, but our subject today is nativity scenes, so here it is. I like that the shepherd is playing some sort of bagpipes, and also that the background decor is made of gift wrapping paper and Christmas lights. Nice touches, which I’ll keep in mind next time I help make a creche.

It was a plug for the upcoming church elections to encourage youth to participate. It attracted about 200 people – about half of which were younger than I. The hymns were straight out of the Finnish Evangelical Lutheran Church’s hymnbook (Virsikirja): 205, 125, 77, 15, 226 (12th-century Latin hymn Jesu dulcis memoria, a monster of 16-stanzas: imagine it in metal! sadly only the first 8 were performed), 332b (here is a sample of this hymn in metal), 160, 517; and the reading from the week’s entry in the Church’s lectionary. But the heavy-metal style of music gave the appropriate sense of urgency to (for example) ”Jumalan Karitsa” (“Agnus Dei”) and the readings (Abram and the stars from Genesis 12; Mark’s account in chapter 2 of healing the paralyzed down the roof) were also poignant about God being our only hope when all else is lost. Totuus on, että hän meni ristille kun kaikki olivat toivoton: sitten tämä risti on meidän toivon tunnus. Overall a moving and striking experience.

I am looking forward to the next time Metal Mass will be in Stadi: the 5th anniversary service will be on 30 June 2010.

It is about
picking a side for yourself
in that old, drawn-out war
they call ‘civil’.

Then around you,
the ever-cumulous skies,
the revolting lands,
the tumultuous seas,
cannot even decide on their own names.

But oddly,
you know exactly
who you are,
where you stand.