While I know you’ve all been waiting with bated breath for Dan’s House of Brigid blogging debut, you’ll have to wait a few more days while we fall into our regular cycle. After this week we should be a lot more predictable.

After a wonderful gathering on Friday with the ACE advocates community in Dublin, we spent the weekend helping Clonard parish begin its transition into using the new English translation of the Roman Missal. We were armed with powerpoints and leaflets guiding the congregation through their changed responses, and while there were a fair few instances of “and also with you…r spirit,” we made it through and everyone seems to be in a good humor about the whole thing. We also began using new Mass settings, and used the new translation as an excuse to get up before Mass and actually teach a piece to the congregation. I’m hoping that this is something we’ll continue beyond the introduction of these new texts, and that it will be something that the congregation at the Vigil Mass, at least, will become used to and that we can use to teach new hymns for a long time in the future.

Both Sr. Mary and Fr. Sean return from out of town this week, which means that we’ll soon be having lots of meetings about the parish Confirmation program, which begins with an information night for parents in two weeks. This is also the week that all the parish’s choirs are starting back up, so our evenings will start to be full with our usual lineup of rehearsals. It’s a perfect week for the choirs to be re-gathering, as the parish is looking this weekend at the upcoming Eucharistic Congress through the lens of gathering. We’re also beginning to look ahead to a workshop we’ll host in October, where we’ll talk about the new translations and different musical treatments of them…hopefully our experience from this past weekend will be useful here!

This week, we’ll also be recording two of the radio programs that Molly mentioned, helping to explain some of the changes to the people’s responses that are coming into effect. I’ve recently discovered that SouthEast Radio streams live over the internet, so anyone who would like to hear our radio work can tune in here. Our first program is this coming Sunday at 8 PM Irish time (so 3 PM for those of you on Eastern time, 2 PM CDT, 1 PM MDT, and 12 PM for my homies on PDT). Hopefully you can tune in!