Community, again

I have, as I said yesterday, been feeling a llittle disconnected, so I decided to act on an idea I got when I arrived yesterday.

Upon arrival at my pension, the check in clerk, giving me directions, told me to turn at the Catholic Church.   This is a real landmark, because though there are a zillion churches in Greece, there are very few Catholic ones.   95% of the population is Orthodox, the next most frequent religion is, I think, Islam.  

So I did turn at the church, noting that they have mass every day, 9AM M,T,W, 7 PM Thur, F, S, and 11 AM on Sunday. an I thought, maybe I’ll stop in.   Yes, it will be in Greek, but one advantage of having grown up catholic is that I know the structure of the mass and what is being prayed and can pray along.   AS much as I love the freer expression of liturgy in my own tradition, having the prayers change means that this is harder in those rare cases when you cannot understand the language.   

The community was saying the rosary when I came in and quietly step down.  There were 5 of them, three men, including the priest, and two women, who were the musicians. They did a FULL hour mass, complete with hymns and special music, at 9 AM on a Wednesday morning.  

And they welcome me so warmly.  The priest delayed slightly starting mass to introduce himself to me and find out what my language was, he sprinkled the mass with various little bits of English, including rereading a couple verses, the key verses of his homily, I think, from the scripture.  After communion, he told the musicians to sing in English, but they gave him a strange look and went along an sang “Magnificat, anima mea Dominum,” of course, in Latin.  

During the mass I kept thinking that their Greek sounded very German, about halfway though the homily I realized this was German, just with an accent I did not really know well, maybe Swabian?   I’m not sure.   In any case at the end I had a great, spirited conversation with them in GErman and promised to come back. 

It was a nurturing and wonderful surprise.  It makes Nafplio no longer just a place to fill out the leftover time in my Sabbatical, but a place of spiritual nurturance for me.  And this trip is more and more about the community we make for the love of God. 

No photo.  I did take some photos of the church, and of the underground chapel one of the men showed me afterwards, but I I’d it with my camera, not my phone, so I won’t have it till I get home.