I am taking Thursdays to go through the
Mass, bit by bit. Thursday, of course, is the day Our Lord established the
Eucharist at the Last Supper, and so is always dedicated to that mystery. The
thrust of my commentary is to show how we are to apply the Mass to our daily
lives.
In
the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. We begin the Mass, after the Entrance Procession, with the sign of
the Cross. This ritual gesture to begin the liturgy is fraught with meaning, of
course. It is always sad, I think, when the priest through some misguided sense
of pastoral care, begins the Mass instead with a cheery ‘Good morning! How you
all doing? Any visitors here? Stand up! Anyone having a birthday? Let’s give
them a round of applause…’ And so on and so forth.
I know the intent is kindly, but it’s just
wrong. I remember once seeing a book about how to transform a parish along such
lines. For all I know, it may have been an OK book, but it was sadly entitled From Holy Hour to Happy Hour! The Mass
is, however, the ‘holy hour’ of the week, if anything is. And so we begin it,
not with happy back-slapping greetings, but with the sign of our faith, the
sign of salvation.
The sign of the Cross operates on so many
levels of meaning. It is, of course, the sign of the Lord’s Cross, the sign of
that by which we were saved, the death of Jesus Christ. It is also the sign of
the Trinity, the very life of God revealed to us and made available to us by
the Lord in his saving action.
It is also the sign of our dedication to
these mysteries, as we pledge our minds, hearts, and actions to the imitation
of Christ’s Paschal Mystery and to the communion of love of the Trinity. And it
expands outwards, even—in pre-Christian pagan thought the shape of the Cross
was the sign of the universe, and in Judaism it is connected to the letter taw,
the last letter of the alphabet which in the vision of Ezekiel 9 signed the
foreheads of those marked for life in Jerusalem.
All of these mysteries are present in this
simple gesture. God and the cosmos, the love of Christ poured out for us as the
paschal blood saving us from destruction, and our own personal commitment to
living out this love in every dimension of our humanity.
And this is the real source of any actual
‘happy hour’ in our lives, don’t you think? The idea that we can just make our
lives joyful and pleasant by a sheer act of will is a bit sketchy, to say the
least. But to place our lives in the larger life of God, made available to us
in Jesus Christ and his saving love—this is where true happiness comes from,
the life of the beatitudes.
To extend this ‘sign of the cross’ into our
lives is a fairly obvious affair. It is good traditional Catholic piety to make
the sign of the cross throughout our day, as a way precisely of reminding
ourselves that our whole day is a living out of the liturgical mystery. Before
beginning a new task, at the beginning and end of meals, at day’s dawning and
at day’s ending, in times of turmoil or confusion or anguish, to sign ourselves
with the sign of love is a powerful way to bind up our whole day in the mystery
of Christ.
Do not disdain these simple and basic
practices of devotion. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel every twenty years,
you know. Catholics have always lived their lives under the sign of the cross—admittedly
at times reflexively, thoughtlessly, or even superstitiously—but even so it is
a proven way of simple faith and consecration to God.
We begin the Mass this way, and so signal
at this most central and holy action of our life that we are a people so
consecrated, and that as we come together as the Church we come together at the
Cross, in the heart of the Trinity. It is, indeed, a happy hour, but a happiness that comes from immersing our whole being in the holiness of God. This is the whole meaning and structure of our
Christian life, and so we carry that sign with us throughout our days.
I find this series on the Mass among your most inspired writings so far, Fr Denis. Looking forward to the future posts that might one day be folded into a book, for these two opening ones are most illuminating.
ReplyDeleteThanks very much - I do have in mind that this would become a book at some point.
DeleteI agree with anonymous. These two posts have been enlightening and thought provoking. I so appreciate the mystery and beauty of the Mass being illuminated like this.
ReplyDelete