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Walking with the Living God
BY BISHOP F. RICHARD SPENCER
LITURGICAL PROCESSIONS are holy moments of walking with the living God! Religious processions are expressions of a people’s desire to walk in mutual harmony toward and with their God. This past Christmas Eve, at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, Father Jason Hesseling and his chapel community decided that an outdoor procession flowing from the Christmas Mass within the military housing communities would provide comfort and beg protection during the current pandemic. So, in nine-degree Fahrenheit weather, we went forth in a liturgical procession. The event was being streamed live on Facebook. Families would gather on their front porches with lighted candles to join with their prayers as the procession passed and receive a blessing with the Blessed Sacrament within the monstrance. Led by a large cross our Christmas procession expressed the fact that our Christian life is a constant movement toward God. Even within a pandemic, our prayer is always “walking with God” in the good times and difficult times of our lives. Our particular procession included Bill Nance, Senior, as the
reader of various biblical reflections as we stopped to pray in the different neighborhoods. Also included in the procession were altar servers Henry Rambo and Billy Nance, Deacon Robert Zbylut, and Father Hesseling.
Why do we have processions within our military chapels? The root word of procession is the Latin processio, “marching forward.” There are many different occasions for liturgical processions. Some are a part of the liturgy for certain feasts: Candlemas, Palm Sunday, Holy Thursday, rogation days, and Corpus Christi. Others are occasioned by a particular circumstance: the solemn transfer of relics or a patronal feast.
Some processions, such as those of the Palm Sunday and the Easter Vigil, relive a special event in the history of salvation. Functional processions, simply solemnize a necessary movement from one place to another, as, for example, funeral processions. Still others have as their purpose to bless and
