The great works of God do not always make the nightly news.
Sunday, 1 March, was just such a day. Archbishop Anthony Fisher OP launched the Year of Prayer in preparation for Eucharist28 at St Mary’s Cathedral with Mass and a Holy Hour.
Concelebrating were Eparchs from the Melkite and Chaldean churches, the auxiliary bishops of Sydney, priests working in the Archdiocese, and a large number of the lay faithful entrusted with taking this movement of renewal to the rest of the nation.
When preparing for any great ecclesial moment, the instinct is to reach for the programme – speakers, singers, entertainers new and old. These have their place. But they are not the deepest preparation.
The real preparation is ritual.
That is why this preparation may have been quieter than many expected. Across parishes and schools there has been patient, unglamorous work in the taking forward of “Jubilate Deo” – a program to get children singing to Jesus in the style Pope St Paul VI desired.
If we want liturgical depth, we must invest in the people who shape it week by week – the organist who selects the hymn, the teacher who forms children to sing, people in the parish who do the work of organising processions.
Christian faith does not hover politely above the body. It is enacted by feet that move, knees that bend, voices that sing, and, especially, eyes that behold. The Council’s call for full, conscious, and active participation was never meant to make us busier during Mass. It was a call to a deeper engagement with the mystery that is celebrated, drawing in the whole person, the heart as well as the head.
This is why processions matter. They are a proclamation that no explanation can fully express, namely, that we are a pilgrim people. We do not stay still. We go places, and we go there together. A modest 500-metre walk around a parish block, reverently arranged and prayerfully undertaken, can catechise more deeply than many excellent talks. I have seen it.
On the same day 700 of the faithful gathered at St Peter Chanel and St Joseph parish, Berala to process with Our Lord, blessing their homes and streets. They were led by a group of primary school students chanting Eucharistic hymns and litanies.
At the benediction in St Peter Chanel, the children who led the procession sat up front. Then they knelt in adoration. Silence matters. Beauty and order are not aesthetic luxuries; they are pastoral necessities. They teach the heart how to kneel before God.
Processions can become part of the ordinary grammar of parish life: Corpus Christi, feast days, confirmations, anniversaries, school Masses. Children’s choirs can carry out a ministry of welcome and farewell. Young people can carry candles and banners (risk assessments having been dutifully conducted). Families can walk together. The elderly can witness from doorways.
Over time, such practices quietly reshape a community’s imagination. Not through spectacle, but through the repetition of these good deeds.
Year after year, liturgical repetition teaches a parish how to pray together, how to move together, how to adore together. In a culture that fragments attention and isolates individuals, deliberate and communal movement provides a quiet witness.
Preparation, then, is not only about what we will say when the moment arrives. It is about who we are becoming long beforehand.
The Year of Prayer and the subsequent years of preparation will mean years of kneeling, years of singing, years of walking, years of forming school children who will know how to be still before the Blessed Sacrament. When the church gathers, it will not be an interruption of ordinary life. It will be the flowering of habits already learned.
