Having a Mass celebrated in one’s living room is a rare experience, one my family has been blessed by several times over the years, when we have been visited by a Jesuit friend from Africa. Performed with a reverence, seriousness and beauty that somehow seems all the more powerful in a domestic setting, I nevertheless always experience a feeling of discomfort and unease. Trying to pray, instead I find myself rehearsing questions and criticisms. Can it be OK to do such holy things in this unconsecrated space? Does it lack piety, to enact the sacred liturgy, the source and summit of the Christian life, with the debris of daily life lying all around?
30 August 2017, The Tablet
At every turn, Jesus does and says things that should shake us to our roots
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