Most Catholics have only been able to participate virtually in the great celebrations of Eastertide and Pentecost. As she prepares to return to the sacraments, a poet and writer remembers another kind of imagined Mass, those that exist and grow in her memory
We have endured an enforced withdrawal into personal spaces for prayer. This has perhaps made time for us to have more meaningful private conversations with God. And we have also seen a creative explosion in new ways to help bring us together even as we are apart. Six weeks ago I never dreamt I would be rising early to listen live online to the homilies of Pope Francis in the intimacy of his private chapel in Casa Santa Marta in the Vatican, or participating in the Good Friday service in St Peter’s, made all the more austere by the splendour of an almost empty basilica.
“Participating” is the remarkable word here, for this is precisely how it has felt, despite the real spiritual and sensory deprivation of not being physically present. Each morning after receiving Communion, the Pope invited us to make a spiritual communion, using a prayer composed by St Alphonsus Liguori that ends with the compassionate words, “Lord, never let me be separated from you”.
All this set me thinking of another kind of virtual Mass: those that exist and grow in our memory. The first Mass I ever attended was at Ligugé, believed to be the oldest monastery still functioning in France. In the long, hot summer of 1976 I was following a course in medieval civilisation at the university of Poitiers, and one of the things on offer was the chance to attend Mass in this famous place nearby. I was increasingly drawn to the thinking of the medieval mind and was excited by this unusual opportunity. Yet at that time I was still the self-consciously atheist child of agnostic parents; I had barely attended an Anglican service in my life, let alone a Catholic Mass. One of my friends on the course was a Tunisian scholar of Mozarabic Spain, himself a practising Muslim, who was keen to accompany me and discover more about the culture he was studying.
