Tuesday, April 26, 2016

LITURGICAL UNDERSTANDING OF THE LUNAR NEW YEAR MASS




 For Vietnamese Catholics, the Lunar New Year Mass is a very important liturgical event that not only says about the Vietnamese culture, but also expresses the spiritual life in relation to their traditional beliefs. Through my observation, there is the couplet (parallel sentences) hung on both sides of the crucifix with a synonymous meaning of God and spring season.  This tradition connects to the veneration of ancestors. Usually, the Vietnamese compose the parallel sentences to hang on both sides of their ancestor’s altar. This influence originates from Vietnamese traditional beliefs to express the nobility of the “golden words” from their ancestors. People want to show the main guiding light of their family as part of their spiritual life regardless of their religious faith. People used yellow and red colors to decorate the Altar. Yellow and red are very popular colors in the especial festivals of Vietnamese culture.  They represent happiness and prosperity. These bright colors can be read as the spirituality of joyfulness in thanksgiving and praise to God. They also show desires or wishes that people want to receive for the whole year: happiness, joyfulness, and prosperity. The readers, acolytes, and ministers of Cup were addressed in the red and yellow traditional clothing “4- part dress” during the Mass as well.  The Dragon team is ready to dance to welcome the presider to the Altar. The Dragon dance with drums and gongs is a set that brought a strong and impressive atmosphere for the Lunar New Year Festival. The Vietnamese believe that Dragon comes to bring good luck and blessings to all people. The choir sang the opening song to praise God as the Eternal Spring. The presider with three burning incense sticks bows his head three times in front of the Altar to worship God and venerate ancestors.  Before giving offerings, there is the traditional dance performed by women with national costumes “Áo dài” and conical hat “Nón lá” and men with 4-part dress “Áo tứ thân” and a plain piece of cloth wrapped around the head “Khăn đống”. The offerings included bread, wine, fruits of Tet  called “Mâm ngủ qủa”, and traditional cakes “Bánh chưng, bánh téc”. The traditional cakes “Bánh Chưng, Bánh Téc” are only made for Lunar New Year. They carry two special meanings: Bánh Chưng represents the Earth, and Bánh Téc represents the Heaven. Today these traditional cakes are brought to the altar as the offerings to express the gratitude of the Vietnamese to the Heaven, the Earth, and their ancestors.  “Mâm Ngũ Quả”  or “five-fruit tray” also demonstrates Vietnamese’ aspiration for the life of abundance and symbolizes their percept of life “when taking fruit, we should give the gratitude to the grower”. Moreover, using burning incense sticks in this liturgy is to connect the worship of God with the veneration of ancestors in a sense that people could ask God and invite their ancestors to bring blessings to the members of their family for the New Year. The smoke of the incense is a way to welcome the ancestors back to the family, bringing a sense of the connection with the divine.

This liturgical tradition is to emphasize on the value of the Vietnamese spirituality. This encourages people to express their gratitude and praise to God and ancestors, spreading the Word of Wisdom and of God to other generations. Understanding the meaning of this celebration can help people recognize the inner beauty of the Vietnamese culture and adapt the culture to the liturgy of the Church in order to express the faith and spirituality as a whole. All traditional costumes, offering “five-fruit tray” and the traditional cakes, and performing dragon dance are to raise the spirit of treasuring and preserving the spiritual and cultural values in the church. This spirituality indicates the relationship of the Vietnamese Catholics to God, to their culture, and to one another.
The mission of this event is to integrate the Catholic Liturgy into the Vietnamese culture. Through this, the Word of God is planted in the culture and becoming the good news to the Vietnamese Catholics.  This celebration is to teach the Vietnamese to keep their culture and to make the liturgical diversity in the Church. These characteristics can clarify the identity of the Vietnamese Catholics including the external beauty and the fullness of inner traditional values. In addition, the worship of Jesus as their ancestor is another noble value of the Vietnamese culture. It tells that the Vietnamese through respect to their ancestors have a deep prayerful life, relating to the cultural values of the Vietnamese, the lessons of the family values, and the way of life in the relationship with God, ancestors, parents, and others.
Moreover, this Lunar New Year Mass does very well the job of combining liturgy, spirituality, and mission to convey a powerful message: praising the loving God as an eternal Spring who brings joyfulness, happiness, and peacefulness to every family and everyone.  Its mission is to show the love of God through serving each other in respect of the relationship between the cultural and religious tradition, which is interwoven closely to each other here. Through this relationship, this event brings the values of different cultures to liturgy, one of significant missions of the Church that all local churches are encouraged to do nowadays. Besides performing dragon dance and liturgical dance with the traditional costumes showing the beauty of the culture and the worship of God through this beauty, the presider’s act of holding the burning incense sticks and bowing his head three times in front of the Altar expressed a very beautiful religious deed. In general, this shows the attitude of worship as the authenticity for the Vietnamese. In a spiritual perspective, this can help the participants increase their devotion and inspiration to God and ancestors. In short, it seems that through the role of the presider, the Vietnamese are led to praise God in using their own cultural ways to express their faith and spirituality, which is a meaningful mission to young Vietnamese Catholics nowadays.

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