Actuallly, in my case, the burden fell on my shoulders 99.9% of the time. For the Red and White Masses, I had to choose the readings, the hymns, compose the General Intercessions (bilingual), make sure that the lectionaries were in order (English/Spanish), order (and sometimes arrange) the flowers (with the help of the wedding coordinator), go over the readings with the lectors and type and arrange the worship aids (booklets).
For the Chrism Mass, along with chossing the hymns and the other arrangments, I had to buy the oils, order the essence of Chrism, type of the labels for the bottles (in Latin), prepare the parish/priest lists and organize a team to fill the bottles and box them up for distribution. Along with this, I also had to select who was going to bring up each urn at the appropriate time and select a suitable hymn to accompany each oil.
For all of the other Masses, I did hymn selections, art and environment and handled the printing (and often the creative efforts) of the worship aids. For our first diaconate ordination Mass, I wound up getting stuck with planning the reception after the Mass because someone at the Chancery had dropped the ball two days before.
On top of everything else, I stayed in the sacrity during each Mass to make sure that things were running okay. This really helped because there were some avoidable snafus that would sometimes pop up and I was prepared to quickly douse a few fires.
It’s very stressful especially when your bishop is more along the lines of “whatever you’ve prepared is fine”. I have always believed that we need a system of checks and balanes. Often, I have had to just refer to the documents. That’s fine with me because that’s what I’m supposed to be doing. But, it does help to have another pair of eyes. I was blessed to have a rector who was more than willing to help out and take a hands-on approach to things. He had no qualms about decorating or getting his hands dirty. The deacon helped some, but, a good chunk of the art and environment fell to the rector, the wedding coordinator and to me.
It wasn’t that we didn’t want to get people involved. Certainly a couple of hands here and there were most helpful. But, grunt work is grunt work. What most people don’t realize that the actual thinking, planning, writing and mapping out takes a lot of energy. The faithful see the beautiful flowers and hear the sacred music, but, they don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. There’s some real hard work that goes into making sure that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated in the manner prescribed by the Church.
During the Easter Vigil, I also had to contend with the RCIA group and make sure that everything was running smoothly for them.
You can certainly suffer burnout from doing this over long periods of time.
I realize that there are some lay liturgists who do get a bum rap because, sadly, they do some things that go very much against what the Church requires and they get too creative. However, there are some of us out there who do our best to ensure that our parishes and dioceses are doing what the Church asks us to do. There are those of us who work to defend the integrity of the Mass, from the perpations to the recessional hymn. We don’t do it for the thanks. We do it because we love Christ and his Church.
