I walked past my city’s Cathedral, yesterday. Clearly, in the past, this week would be the second busiest week of the year, for the (Anglican) bishopric, but there was barely a peep out of it…
Some very needy, QR-code-involving signs, but no real decoration, no one going in or out… And this is the largest church in the whole state…
Some photography group was taking photos of the outside, but that’s about it.
Then I went to a Christmas “food market”, and it was, well, the closest it got to “Christmas” was decorations, an appearance by Santa (initially hidden in a giant paper candle, while he was wheeled in, lol), and a jazz band of danger hairs performing woke, “Christmas-adjacent” songs (“Christmas in LA”, anyone? Erykah Badu, anyone?)…
Aside from that, it’s like the city (with a Greens council, no less) barely cares anymore. Everything is “Season’s Greetings”, “Happy Holidays”, or, like, “Happy Summer”.
People really only care about being able to make money out of it, getting a few days off, a fucking yacht race, and a Summer food festival that starts on Tuesday… In fact, I would say there is more New Years’ stuff around, than Christmas, sadly…
Some of this is symptomatic of being in the Southern Hemisphere, granted, but it’s interesting that in places with higher numbers of first-gen British expats in Australia, which are also more conservative (notably Perth, but also Brisbane and Sydney), I’ve seen much more “Christmas-ness”, I suppose…
But I also don’t remember it being like this when I was a kid, or even like a decade ago, so… It’s just a bit weird, to me, I guess.
Anyone else have this sort of “less Christmassy Christmas”, where you are..? It’s probably mostly an Anglosphere problem, but I feel like somewhere like California (or maybe even Scotland) is probably just as bad, if not worse, lol…
When was the last time you prayed a rosary?
Never. I ain’t Catholic.
I’ve been to a Catholic Mass all of once, lol.
I don’t think Anglicans do any of that stuff, and that’s the closest I got, growing up, so…
There are multiple versions of the Anglican rosary. Some high church Anglicans even pray the Marian rosary. But my point is if you don't have an active prayer life now, or haven't actively attended a church since childhood, what expectations can you hold for your community?
Everyone is always complaining about there being no Christ in Christmas anymore, it's too secularized, there's no joyful spirit around the holiday anymore, etc. That's because no one cares about Christ anymore. You had churchs lock their doors, tell everyone to "stay home, you might get us sick!" "You don't need the sacraments, even on your death bed". The message was loud and clear: "Christ and the church don't matter", and everyone took that to heart. If it's not important to the clergy, why should the laity care? If the laity don't care, why would anyone in the community give it a thought?
I thought they did.
It's basically catholicism but started so the king could get divorced and not in communion with rome. Has most everything else that catholicism has. A few more named angels, a few different things here and there, but yeah ya have prayer beads. Maybe just not emphasized as much as in cathololicism?
To the point where there's a catholic mass (under the roman rite) and special type of diocese called the ordinariate. It's basically a bunch of ex-anglicans/church of englanders now doing mostly their own Anglican thing while in communion with rome, it's similar enough that that wasn't too much trouble to organize a decade ago (when a the anglicans/CoE'ers grew disatisfied with the growing LGBTism pushed in the anglican church).
Join us brother. I don't see an ordinariate church in tassy, but I do see an email link when searching for it. And it's not too disimilar anyway like I said. I've been going to a more traditional latin catholic church myself though.
And it's christmas. What better day to start?