Fr Warren Kinne celebrating Easter Mass from his apartment on the Gold Coast. Photos: Fr Warren Kinne SSC & canva.com
It looked like it was going to be a very quiet Easter with all the Churches closed. I had already started up a small family and friends group on various internet platforms for Mass on Sundays.
In China they use We Chat as most other apps are banned but Australian friends didn’t like the idea of We Chat with their Chinese servers. I found a happy compromise on Zoom and the small and intimate group was pleased with the interaction from our various locations.
Then just before Palm Sunday, a friend in Shanghai, a Malaysian Chinese convert to the Church who had previously involved me with her bible study groups, contacted me with a request. The expat English-speaking Catholic community in Shanghai, whom I formerly had a lot to do with, were without Easter ceremonies. The Chinese priests who ran the three parishes with English Masses were in lockdown and all confined to the huge Cathedral priests’ residence and said they were unable to be of practical assistance. Her request was would I be able to do some online services for them.
Now Anne Chai is a very persuasive person and for some reason or other she calls me Barnabas and I am not sure why. She is very knowledgeable about the Scriptures. I, of course, tried to fend off her request from my relaxed Easter with a few books and alone here on the Gold Coast. I asked where the local priests were.
However, in the end I agreed to do the Easter ceremonies from my desk in my apartment with whatever resources I had at hand.
Little did I know that I was in for meetings with multiple groups preparing the different celebrations for the number of ceremonies that take place over Easter. One meeting, for the Easter Vigil, took two and a half hours online, and then my Zoom snapped and crackled for hours as everyone in the preparatory groups had their say. People that I hadn’t spoken to for years wanted to chat and with the time change it made for very long days and short nights.
Despite the glitches that go with a bonfire for the Easter vigil in Hong Kong, the cantors in Shanghai, the priest in Main Beach, Qld, the host of the account in Malaysia, everything worked out reasonably well. We had our fair share of static, switching of the camera to the wrong person at the wrong time, the maid yelling at the kids in the kitchen, and the fire that would not go out. But all in all it was a great celebration with many people shedding tears of joy over the experience.
There was a hiccup the first night when many friends couldn’t get onto the site because it was overloaded. We had only purchased a platform for 100 participants. Of course, this represented a lot more viewers with a catechumen group of nine on one device and a family of six on another. People projected the screen onto their TVs in their living rooms.
For the Good Friday, one kind person offered to pay for an upgrade for us, for up to 300 devices. I needed to spend time instructing a couple of octogenarian relatives and friends how to use Zoom and log in with a long string of characters in the ID and Password. Despite their magnifying glasses and many frustrating attempts, they did eventually have some success.
I borrowed a purple scarf from one friend to cover the Good Friday cross, an orchid from another friend to liven up Easter, and my French Caribbean-born friend peddled his bike with his daughter on the back to find me an Easter candle in a line of shops that were largely closed. It was a group effort.
Even as I write this, Anne is ringing to say wasn’t it providential that the surprise party for my 50th anniversary in Singapore which many from China, Hong Kong and Taiwan had planned to attend was called off over the coronavirus because now they didn’t need to worry about visas and plane tickets and quarantines. In any case we had all met up for the most significant liturgies of the year. It is indeed an ill wind, I was told, that blows no good.
She also commended me on my political acumen in slipping St Columban into the optional Saint in the Masses and recommending, at the end of the Easter Sunday Mass, that they take our great experience back to their local parishes and goad the local priests into the experience of new technologies. My quiet life might return.
Columban Fr Warren Kinne served for nearly 20 years as a missionary in China and now lives and works on the Gold Coast.
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- Read more from The Far East, June 2020
