alan29 wrote:And more often those charisms are absent.
Or latent or nascent, perhaps.
And that's where formation and training is SO important.
I am naturally fairly musical, but have absolutely no formal musical or liturgical training. Neither, when I was asked to start our music group, was any reading - never mind training - suggested or offered. It's only because I'm OCD that I started to research, discovered this forum, etc., etc. The more I discovered, the more I wanted to learn and understand and thus inform my ministry as well as others in the music group. But I could quite easily have just produced a hymn sandwich every week and absolutely nothing would have been said.
alan29 wrote:And more often those charisms are absent.
Or latent or nascent, perhaps.
And that's where formation and training is SO important.
I am naturally fairly musical, but have absolutely no formal musical or liturgical training. Neither, when I was asked to start our music group, was any reading - never mind training - suggested or offered. It's only because I'm OCD that I started to research, discovered this forum, etc., etc. The more I discovered, the more I wanted to learn and understand and thus inform my ministry as well as others in the music group. But I could quite easily have just produced a hymn sandwich every week and absolutely nothing would have been said.
You are to be congratulated. I hope you are given verbal support and encouragement by your PP at the very least. Each diocese has a Liturgy Commission. I wonder what they actually get up to .... apart from have meetings. If that is where expertise is concentrated you would hope they were active in disseminating knowledge and best practise one way or another. I wonder if anyone has ever done a survey??
I don't think that the Cardiff diocese has one. It certainly needs one. There were at one time a few flagship parishes; otherwise it's meagre fayre. Best bet is Roath's St Martin's (Anglican) church.
It was good at one time, there was the Cardiff Archdiocesan Music Resource Group - a bit fluffy-libby but not at all bad for that. It certainly did what it says on the tin; i.e. armed parish musicians with resources of varying levels in order that liturgies could be revitalised. Its aim wasn't to improve the Mass, we can't do that; rather it aimed to enrich the celebration.
I wonder what became of it? Maybe poor support from people like me contributed to its demise. Mea culpa.
I think you can take it as read that with Frances Bibey on the Commission (actually its Secretary), and given her roles with SSG as a Trustee and Commissioning Editor of the journal, music will certainly be on the Commission's agenda. I know that she and Jennifer Burridge have run successful workshop days in the past, and perhaps still do. Gwyn, it sounds as if you need to ask Frances to get you back in the loop.
And more importantly the same style will not evangelise / nourish / engage everyone.
As I've got older and more musically aware, I've found spiritual riches in material which sounded like pretentious caterwauling in my younger years, and I've found that material which used to focus my on Jesus now sounds trite.
Pretty such I'm not alone in such maturation - and that it cannot be hurried, and is not guaranteed.
