It was a really cool experience for me because I hadn't been able to go to mass in a while due to our travel schedule, and I'd missed it! It was a great way to start out the day, very refreshing, and also I let myself see it also as a cool cultural experience too.
The priest at St Nicholas clearly knows his parishioners very well. Sunday was the feast of Pentecost in the Catholic Church, and that was the day that the Holy Spirit came to the Apostles and they were able to communicate in lots of different languages with people. What cooler feast to celebrate in South Africa, land of 11 official languages, another 12 languages recognized as widely spoken languages but not used as a medium to print official documents. At the beginning of mass, the parish priest announced that his co-celebrant for the morning was a priest from another city but the priest who is responsible for the translation of the new mass translation into Afrikaans. Sunday was also, quite fittingly, the release date for the Eucharistic prayer portion of that new translation. But then my heart sank because I was afraid mass was going to be in Afrikaans, and I wasn't sure I was up for that kind of cultural experience. Fortunately, everything but some of the songs were in English.
During the homily, the priest demonstrated how well he knows his parishioners when he called out the first languages of the people sitting in the church. There were so many - he kept going and going. He hit upon most of the official languages of South Africa, pointing to individuals and families sitting in the Church; he couldn't remember the home language of a few people, but he knew it was something he hadn't yet said, so he directly asked them. Everything from English to Afrikaans to Igbo to Xhosa to Zulu to Tswana to Sotho, etc etc etc. Then he went on to talk about language as a dividing or unifying force, and how in reality all languages should be used for love, and to spread love. That was the meaning of the original Pentecost. Just two weeks before, I'd been standing on the spot where a little less than 37 years ago Hector Peterson, a 12-year-old boy, was shot by policemen of his own country because he was present when the high school students of Soweto were protesting the enforcement of Afrikaans language as the medium of instruction in their classrooms. It was quite a powerful experience to hear this sermon in South Africa.
The other remarkable thing I've noticed about this church was that 1) it is crowded at 8am on a Sunday and 2) it is the most accurate representation of the Western Cape's population demographics. Since I've been in this country, I've seen people of white, black, colored, and Indian descent - the four official racial categories under apartheid (and still, purportedly for affirmative action...). But I've never really seen them mixing. Campus is mostly white and some colored. But to a significant extent, it seems to self-segregate. Kayamandi is all black except for a few white volunteers. IdasVlei is all colored. Areas, neighborhoods, streets, clinics, etc etc etc - basically everywhere we go, things are mostly segregated as the legacy or scars of apartheid. But this Catholic Church was primarily colored people and then white people and then black people and then even a few Indian people. It feels so weird even noticing this anymore. But it wasn't until this Sunday really, until mass was almost over, that I realized that something was different about the demographic composition of this place and what was different about it. It was kind of beautiful and hopeful. Although the system is still extremely messed up and although the legacy of apartheid has left lasting horrible scars on the landscape and demography of this country, especially the Western Cape, some things are bigger. Bigger than apartheid. Bigger than racism. Bigger than the Group Areas Act or any destructive person who participated in its enforcement. Love is bigger. Hearts are bigger. People will come together for things that unite them. They come together as a community. There's no white church, a black church; there's not even a white area, a colored area, a black area of the church. It's brother and sister. It's friends. It's family. The sign of peace is one of my favorite times of any mass, and this Sunday, it came along just as I was making this observation and I almost teared up I was so ecstatic.
Although of course it's nuanced in the context of location, it truly is the same wherever you are. And that's one of the things I love the most about it.
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