Pentecost (2012)

Sunday, 27 May 2012

 

Entrance	Come Holy Ghost, creator come
Gloria	Glory to God (Peter Jones)
Psalm	Send forth your Spirit (Paul Wellicome)
Gospel Acclamation	Easter Gospel Acclamation (Brian Luckner)
Rite of Confirmation	(i) Send forth your Spirit, renew the face of the earth (Christopher Walker) (i) Spirit of the living God & Ps 103 (John Ainslie) (iii) Veni Sancte Spiritus (Taizé)
Preparation of the Gifts	Emitte Spiritum tuum (Johann Evangelist Habert, 1833-1896)
Sanctus, Acclamation, Amen	Spring Sanctus (mcb)
Agnus Dei	Lamb of God II (mcb)
Communion	My Peace (Taizé) & Ps 84(85) (A Gregory Murray)
Recessional	Christ be our light (Bernadette Farrell)

 

Thirty-two seven- and eight-year old children, and a handful of adult candidates, took their next step along the journey of Christian initiation by receiving the sacrament of Confirmation from Bishop Terence. For the children, it’s only a few weeks until first holy communion. The lengthy confirmation rite made a pastoral necessity of curtailing the Liturgy of the Word, so we omitted the second reading, and moved the sequence from before the Gospel reading to during the rite itself. We sang it in the form of Jacques Berthier’s prayerful ostinato, with cantor Robin Wolfendale supplying the text of the sequence.

We began the rite of Confirmation with a bit of musical fun – Chris Walker’s Send forth your Spirit. Starting with another simple ostinato refrain, this time in tresillo (3+3+2) rhythm, we added vocal harmonies and percussion in the form of claves, shaker, congas and guiro, and then the sopranos supplied psalm verses from Ps 103(104). We don’t usually get requests for an encore, but when the procession outran the music provided some twenty minutes later, a celebrant whispered “do the one with the drums again”, and we were glad to oblige.

I had to dig deep on the internet to find out anything about Johann Evangelist Habert. Despite being president of the Upper Austrian Caecilienverein, by all accounts he was an opponent of the hard core Cecilian movement, and stood up for the continued use of instruments in church. Good man.