Three sentences, 10 words.
Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.
Simple and effective while being, of course, mysterious.
Simply sung at church, and yet instructive.
I went to parochial school through eighth grade and my wife tends to believe that makes my catechism, if not perfect, certainly better than hers. I confess only to having some schooling in it by skilled instructors.
You never know how skilled an instructor is until a lesson comes back, years later, in the most unexpected places, when you aren't thinking about it or anything related to it.
None of them had steel rulers, but you'd never think any of them had any subtlety.
Yet the whole curriculum was designed that way. I didn't figure out until I was a grown man how they had had done what they'd done, and there was indeed some subtlety to it. When the number 12 came up in a math class, we were reminded about the Apostles. Twelve could also be a lesson in subtraction (taking out Judas) and addition (putting back his replacement, maybe throwing in Paul as well, because the man himself said he was an apostle.
So it turns out the 12 Apostles can be at least 14 guys.
They did things like that, but you never knew, until later.
In late 2003, early 2004, I went to the funeral for the mother of a friend of mine up in the mountains of North Carolina. It was, I believe, a Presbyterian service. Despite being in the religious minority as a Catholic for 34 years in South Carolina, I have managed to stay away from many of the other Christian services over the years.
Despite a female minister leading the service for my friend's mother, it seemed similar in some ways.
They even had, I thought, the memorial acclamation, which comes in our services right after the Mystery of Faith.
"Christ has died," they started.
Wanting to participate as much as I could for my friend, I tried to go along. But couldn't.
"Christ HAS risen," they said. "Christ will come again."
That's not the acclamation, not as taught to me in an ENGLISH class at St. Raymond's.
It came up in English class because we were learning verb tenses.
"Christ has died," we were told, is past-tense construction. It is a historical fact., something that happened, happened once, something done and over.
They weren't telling us there were no implications from the Crucifixion, but they were putting an amen to the event itself.
You might sense then the chagrin I had at this funeral when they said "Christ HAS risen."
That's also past tense.
The teacher pointed out the acclamation says Christ IS risen. Present tense. It isn't something that happened. It is something that is still with us in a different way. It is happening, always happening.
And Christ will come again. Future tense.
It's just three sentences, 10 words. But it's important, I found right then without looking for it, in that it created a distinction between being a Catholic and something else.
A more recent turn I took with the acclamation, as constituted above, came as something I consider pure gift. One day, just out of the blue, my then 3-year-old son started stnging it.
He's got a nice voice and we love to hear him sing.
He has has an unfortunate integrity, however, which means will never perform on command. Those times when he kicked my wife while in the womb, she'd call for me to come over and feel for it. And thought we'd beg, he wouldn't kick again for daddy.
You can't ask him to sing most of the time. I don't quite remember when it was, but he just sang, "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again."
I'm sure it was close in the week to a Sunday, but I don't think it was on a Sunday.
He did it for a few days, then found something else to do. But he had obviously been paying attention at church and picked up on it.
But it wasn't recently, because I haven't heard THAT acclamation used lately. I've missed a few services for sure, but at the services I've attended, it's always one of the other, longer, clunkier "mysteries of faith."
"Dying you destroyed our death, rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus come in glory," is the one I'm hearing most frequently. There are others. There's one the guitar choir uses at my mother's church that I seem to have a post-traumatic stress disorder block on remembering.
It may be that the acclamations go in and out of season, but to me, the acclamation has been, since I received what I thought was a pretty good Catholic education at an outstanding Catholic school, those three sentences, those 10 words.
My wife is editor of this paper, which will in the new year begin a series for Catholics in the diocese on the revisions they are making to the Missal and the mass. I hope one of the things that will be explained is why "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again," is not listed in among the acceptable acclamations we will recite in Mass.
I know there are some who are "opposed" to the revisions and the "new" missal. I know the counterargument is that Vatican II wasn't supposed to change what we say at Mass, just allow us to say it in the vernacular.
I only write this to say that those three sentences, those 10 words seem to capture the essence of the acclamation in plain, simple, language, language that a 3-year-old can remember and on his own sing, language that can be "multi-purposed" to have a dash of grammar along with a pinch of cathechism.
So I'd really like to know why it's going.
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