Processions were very much more significant in the pre-concillior Rites than they are in the present liturgy. It is worth meditating on their significance.
At their most basic level they symbolise the movement from one place to another, from outside the Church to inside it. It speaks, like pilgrimage, of the movement from this world to the next, of the growth in Christian perfection, of movement in the Church and in our own Christian life, of Man's ultimate destiny: Heaven.
Processions are essentially about moving with Christ, as a sacred community. Vatican II uses the metaphor of the procession, "the Pilgrim People", to speak of the Church, it seems a shame that their significnce has actually dimished.
In the Medieval world processions were designed to demonstrate and show the nature of the a Christian society, as much as the heirarchic and salvific nature of the Church. The Roman Stational Masses took the Pontiff on a tour of his diocese, presumably, at least signifying that the Bishop of Rome had nowhere permanent to lay his head. In the rites used in England the procession was an essential part of the rite Palm Sunday, elsewhere the taking of the Blessed Sacrament to some other place, often an altar in a cemetery was part of the usage of Holy Thursday.
The phrase "Creeping to the Cross" suggests quite clearly the ancient practice of the whole local community slowly, often on its knees, with great ceremony coming to venerate the either the Cross itself, or the recumbent figure of the crucified, a time for mourning and public grief and penance. For the mass of people this rite itself, as we see still in the great Holy Week processions of Spain was, rather than the Chuch's official liturgy, the great popular re-enactmenet of the Passion.
The Stations of the Cross, is essentially a processional rite, again in which we learn to conform ourselves to the Crucified.
The rather hodge-podge rites of the Easter Vigil begin with the blessing of what was presumably a newly kindled Easter beacon and the taking into the church (often as quickly as possible - lest it blow out) the lit Paschal Candle. Again it is rich in significance: following Christ, the tiny candle flame in the dark at the beginning, in the glowing shared light; it is metaphor of faith, that leads to the unlocking of the mysteries of salvation.
The readings themselves are a procession, from creation to salvation.
The procession to the baptismal font (strange there is no procession from it) gives a wonderful image of the local Church together with Saints in Heaven interceding for those to be baptised, it is about what Christ has already won for us.
And ...celebrating Mass ad Orientem is processional, and directs us to the eternal destiny of mankind, the Eucharist and the worship of the Eternal Father.
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