Longer liturgies

One of the things that is very noticeable when it comes to comparing Irish liturgies with those in Panama is that liturgies here are much longer. It is not that they are drawn out, it is simply that they are over when they are over. People here are not as concerned as Irish people tend to be with liturgies finishing within a determined time window - masses here, for example, tend to be much longer than in Ireland but people don't have any great issue with that.

Why are they longer? Firstly, there is much more singing. It is simply not the done thing here to have a mass without singing; and when they sing here they sing several verses of every song. Compare that to a weekday mass in Ireland and you can very easily see a contrast.

There is a wide variety of songs used here when it comes to singing and, what is very striking, is that the singing, while it may be led by a small choir, is done by everyone. In Panama a choir singing on behalf of the people is really only contenanced while the congregation is learning a new hymn. And new hymns are actively sought out here - Panamanians, in their parishes, tend to have quite a repetoire of hymns and older hymns are only sung rarely. This is quite different to Ireland where most of the hymns that tend to be sung are certainly not recently written. Another big contrast between the two churches is that in Panama any individual parish will vary the type of hymns to be sung quite a bit. With the exception of the parts of the mass (Lord Have Mercy, Holy Holy, Lamb of God etc) which don't change all that much, each parish will actively seek to vary the types of hymns (local rhythms, eucharistic, marian, charismatic, biblical etc).

One of the really lovely things here when it comes to singing is the way in which, in almost every eucharistic celebration, the psalm is sung. They normally stick to the text as it appears in the Lectionary but they have all sorts of psalm tones and tunes which are normally accompanied by the guitar - these are very beautiful and really help to reflect on the word of God.

Another reason that Panamanian liturgies tend to be longer is that there is a homily at each mass. Unlike Ireland, homilies here can be long (sometimes an hour or more) and can often cover a lot of material. Personally (and I know that a lot of Panamanians would agree with me), I think the homilies are often too long. Indeed, sometimes the length of the homily can be inversely proportional to the amount of time spent in preparing it (if less time is spent in preparation, the homily can be very long indeed) - the philosopher, Blaise Pascal, once wrote a very long letter to friend and, at the end of the letter he apologised for the length of the letter, saying that he hadn't had time to write a shorter one.

Of course, the real test of whether or not people find the liturgies long is how they react at the end. People here don't, at all, run for the door at the end of mass. In fact, many people come to mass with the express intention of spending a lot of time after mass meeting people, getting involved in activities, or even sharing food (especially on Sundays).

The daily mass in the seminary normally lasts just under an hour but twice this week, for example, it lasted an hour and a half - a nice rhythm if you are able to allow yourself to relax in to it (and if the heat and the mosquitos aren't getting to you).