Being a missionary priest presents a few difficulties when it comes to filling out official forms. Not having a wife and/or a family, not having a mortgage or an income, not having an address that can be called “permanent” means we do not fit the usual profile on which many of these forms seem to be based.
I also have a few dilemmas when it comes to the category of ‘occupation’ especially on the forms that I have to fill out on departure from or arrival into New Zealand. There is never enough room to put ‘missionary priest’ so I have to pick one or the other. I usually go with priest though I often wonder what response that term is likely to evoke these days from the person who will deal with me in Immigration.
Another possibility that I have been tempted to enter on occasions is ‘Celebrant.’ I don’t use it on official forms because it describes a segment of what I do rather than the whole of it but it is an influential segment.
It is indeed a gift of priesthood that we are present at significant moments of celebration in people’s lives - weddings, baptisms, funerals, sickness and reconciliation.
In my present situation here in Lower Hutt my occupation is primarily that of fundraising and mission awareness. When I help out at one of our local parishes I find myself again in the role of celebrant. I am aware of both the privilege and the challenge of this role, also that it is a wonderful job We are essentially a celebrating community where the priest presides when the Christian community celebrates Eucharist. In the Eucharist we touch base with the summit and source of our lives as Christians.
While it represents such a small investment of time that it cannot be classed as an occupation this celebration reminds us that our faith is a total way of life. When we break bread in memory of Jesus we keep alive the dangerous memory of the ‘crucified and risen one’ in a way that shapes and colours all our thinking and acting. Whatever we might write under the category of occupation, everything we seek to do is influenced by what happens here. At least that is how it is meant to be.
Speaking of the meaning of full, active and conscious participation in the Eucharist that Vatican II called for, Frank Anderson in his book, “Eucharist: Participating in the Mystery” suggests that it is not about an increased busyness on the part of many during the Eucharist but of “being swept up into the mystery of gratitude, self giving and joy that the ritual is meant to embody”.
He adds in the preface to the book that when going to Mass on Sunday begins to lose its appeal for Catholics then to that degree, we begin to lose our sense of being Church. A crisis of faith is in some measure a crisis of identity.
It seems to me that Anderson is on to something when he suggests that all the members of the Christian community (not just the priest) need to be able to identify themselves as celebrants. We are not people who are fulfilling an obligation, or keeping the rules or doing a religious duty when we gather for Eucharist. We are “celebrants,” people who are called to be swept up into the mystery of God revealed in the face of Jesus. I wonder if we really grasped this notion of celebration as a description of who we are, how it might change the experience of what we do before, during, and after Eucharist.
Fr Patrick O'Shea lives at St Columbans Lower Hutt, New Zealand.
Read more from The Far East, April 2011