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This first of all I ask, that petition, prayer, entreaty and thanksgiving should be offered for all mankind. 1 Tim 2:1
In my last sermon, I hadn't time to talk about one feature which had just come into the Mass for the first time; I mean the bell. Why do we ring bells such a lot? I suspect that the little tinkly bell in the sanctuary is only a sort of midget edition of the big bell or bells up in the Church tower. Just as, at the Introit, the priest says only one verse of a psalm when he ought to be saying the whole psalm through, so, I suspect, the bells in the tower were meant to be rung a lot more than they are, only the sacristan was too idle to hang on to a great rope every time the priest got to the Sanctus. You see, it would be jolly for sick people if they could follow the Mass all the way through, instead of only hearing the Consecration bell rung at the High Mass on Sundays. I may be quite wrong about all this; I'm only making it up. I could talk to you for hours and hours about Church bells. Why are they christened, for example, like human beings? I don't mean they get the grace of faith, but there is a kind of christening ceremony, and they are given names. That's surely odd; nothing else in church gets a name given to it. You would think it very unusual if I started calling the alms-dish Percy. I suppose bells are so much mixed up with the important events of our lives; the wedding peals and the funeral chimes and so on, that the medieval people used to have a kind of friendly feeling for them; they were the public pets of the village. They were also supposed to drive the devil away, and I must say I know a lot of Church bells that would drive me away if I were the devil. But we really haven't time to talk about all that; let's confine our attention to the little tinkly bell.
Our attention-it says in the books that the bell is rung at Mass to excite the attention and devotion of the faithful. It seems to me a very queer notion that at High Mass anyhow, when the priest has been singing his way so vigorously through the Preface, and the choir has just started with great chords on the organ to get through the Sanctus, a tiny little bell in the sanctuary should have the effect of waking the faithful up. I should have thought that kind of faithful would have needed a siren. No, honestly I think it's all part of this business about the holy Angels, and the priest feeling that he's just arrived at the door of Heaven and can look through the key-hole. Having arrived at the door, we ring the bell. And we don't do it to amuse ourselves; we do it to show the holy Angels that we are there. " Please say that Mary Jane has come to call "-that is the point of the Sanctus-bell. Or, if you like to keep up that allegory of the train getting into Paddington which we were talking about last Sunday, you may think of the Sanctus-bell as one of those little tinkly noises that are always going on inside the signal box when you are waiting for your train at a station. It's supposed to mean, I think, that the line is clear; the next train can come along without any fear of an accident. So, if you prefer to put it that way, say the Sanctus-bell means the line is clear, and Mary Jane can go forging ahead.
Meanwhile, the priest has gone silent again. As I say, that may be simply because at High Mass the choir haven't nearly got to the end of the Sanctus, and the priest doesn't wait till they do. At Low Mass, it's a good effective silence, don't you think, when the Canon of the Mass begins? A clean, crisp sort of silence which gives you the impression that something rather important is happening; everybody is holding their breaths in excitement. And, of course, if you are the sort of person who prefers to say your own prayers instead of following the liturgy, it's a useful silence too. It's the time you ought to be praying for all the people you want to pray for; and a great many other people as well, hungry Germans and persecuted Poles and atheists in Russia and atheists in our own country. But these sermons are meant for people who do like to follow the liturgy; so we must take a peep over the priest's shoulder and see what it is he's reading about. We have got it in our own books, with a crib; the crib starts " Thee therefore, O most clement Father ", which doesn't sound much like English. What is he really saying?
It is as though he had just remembered that he hasn't done anything at all about the bread and wine since the Offertory; they might just as well not have been there, all this time. So he gets back to work, to the real sacrifice. The liturgical people make a great deal of fuss about the word " therefore ", but there's no need to. You will find in the Latin dictionary that igitur means " therefore ", but it's a very weak word really, it's hardly more than clearing your throat: " Chrrrm! Well then, as I was saying "- that's all it means. And the priest says, "Well then, we know what a loving Father you are-the Preface has told us all about that; and we are coming to you Per Jesum Christum Dominum nostrum, because our Lord Jesus Christ said we might, and he would make it all right for us. And we want you to accept from us, and to bless so that they will be supremely useful to us, these gifts of ours, these offerings of ours, this holy sacrifice, so virgin-pure." He talks in that exaggerated way about a round piece of unleavened bread that has come out of a tin, and a small quantity of not frightfully good wine from Australia because, as I say, the action of the Mass is all one, and time doesn't count. The bread and wine have not yet been consecrated; but they are going to be consecrated so soon that it is all one as if they were; he is already making to Almighty God the eternal sacrifice of Calvary.
And then he goes on to describe who it is he is making this offering for. Don't let's forget the meaning of that; every grace you and I ever get is given to us only because Jesus Christ died for us and was offered up instead of us, bore our punishment instead of us. And in the Mass, which is a continuation of Calvary, we are, as it were, trying to push our Lord forward and make him the representative of all the people we want to pray for. You know how, if a crowd of you have to make some rather embarrassing request from some rather important person-if Reverend Mother comes down, and you want to ask her for a holiday, you all stand there trying to push one another forward? " No, go on, you say it . . . No, don't be so silly, she wouldn't pay any attention to me, you say it", and so on. Well, in a way that's what we are doing in this part of the Mass. We want God to do something about all the unhappy people in Europe who have nowhere to go, nowhere to live, and so we put forward at the head of them our Lord Jesus Christ, who had nowhere to lay his head-surely Almighty God will pay attention now? And so on. That's what offering our Lord in the Mass means - piling all our needs on to his shoulders, his patient shoulders; hiding all our defects behind his robe, his big, comfortable robe.
So we start, you see, by praying for the whole Catholic Church. Not just for us; we are only a fragment of the Catholic Church. And there is only one altar really; that altar behind me is the same thing as the High Altar at St. Peter's and the High Altar at Westminster Cathedral, and the nasty little soapbox on which, perhaps, some miserable, exiled priest is saying Mass as best he can, somewhere out in Siberia. Only one altar, and the whole Catholic Church is one congregation, worshipping together; all of you as you kneel at Mass here are only specimens, good specimens, let's hope, of the whole Catholic Church which is kneeling in this chapel, only you can't see it. just as the Mass cuts out time, it cuts out space. Shove up a bit closer there, and make room for those Esquimaux ...
But of course this terrific thing, the unity of the Christian Church, isn't an easy thing for our imaginations to grasp. Most of us find it easier to get excited over a person than over an institution. Our patriotism is more easily excited by " God Save the King " than by " Rule Britannia "; because King George, even if we haven't seen him, is a voice on the wireless, whereas Britannia is only an imaginary female on the back of a coin. So in the Mass we focus the whole idea of the Catholic Church for ourselves by seeing it as represented in one man, Pope Pius XII. We ask God to give the Church peace, that is, a let-up from all its persecutions; to give it unity, that is, more friendliness among its existing members and better hopes of bringing back strayed Christians into its fold; and to give it wise government. And all those ideas are easily summed up for us when we think about the Holy Father at Rome, and think about what he is thinking about. But at the same time we are not meant to forget that we have got special ties, special loyalties of our own. So, after mentioning Pope Pius XII as a person we want specially blessed, please, we go on to explain to Almighty God that we belong to the Shrewsbury diocese; you know, Bishop Moriarty.
In the Missal I use, I don't know about yours, the Pope's name isn't there, and the Bishop's name isn't there; instead of putting in Pius and the Bishop's name the Missal says our Pope N. and our Bishop N. The point of that, of course, is that popes aren't immortal and bishops aren't immortal; they are only spare parts which can be replaced. And from the priest's point of view that comes in particularly well just here-you see, it puts him in his place. If he was tempted to feel at all self-conceited over the honour which is done him when he is allowed to offer this tremendous sacrifice, he is pulled up now by the thought that he, like the Pope and the Bishop, is only a spare part which can be replaced. The Mass is offered in this chapel not by Monsignor Knox but by your priest N.
N. stands for anybody; any other priest would do just as well. Hundreds of thousands of Masses are being said all over the world, and this is just one of them. You know how they put down little reflectors of red glass at the corner of the road where there is a cross-roads, or where some sharp turn makes it dangerous; and as your car comes up at night, the light of the headlamps is caught by these and reflected back? Well, the priest ought to think of himself as one little piece of red glass; the moment when he consecrates, when he offers sacrifice, is the moment in which the prayer of the universal Church is caught up and reflected in him. Only for a moment; then he goes back to being a dull, ordinary piece of glass again.
Having been through that bit of self-humiliation, the priest is now allowed to remember that he is a human being, and some people do interest him more than others. He is allowed, for a moment, to stop talking Latin; to think, for a moment, of the people for whose needs he personally wants this Mass to be an availing sacrifice. I ask God to convert Stalin or whatever it may be. And immediately after that I go on to say et omnium circumstantium: " Please don't think I want you to listen to me more than to any of those horrible little creatures who are fidgeting behind me. Quorum tibi fides cognita est, et nota devotio-they do really believe in you, they are really quite pious, some of them, and each of them has her own intention that she's thinking about at this moment, and it's just as good as mine. So please take it that this goes for Mary Jane's intention as well as mine. Pro quibus tibi offerimus; I am offering this sacrifice for them, just as much as. for myself. Vel qui tibi offerunt, and they, just as much as myself, are offering this Mass, so please don't convert Stalin if you would sooner convert Mary Jane's aunt. They are offering the Mass pro se suisque omnibus, for themselves and all they love; their souls want saving, they need health of body and soul, preservation of body and soul from all harm that might befall them; some of them asked rather specially to be called this morning, so please bless every one of them every bit as much as me."
I'm afraid we are making very slow time, and I would have liked to talk about the Communicantes this afternoon, but that's too big a subject and too fresh a subject to tackle now. What I want to get firmly into your heads now is this-that when you see me standing up there mumbling to myself and apparently taking no notice of you, all dressed up in silk like a great pin-cushion, you mustn't think of me as something quite apart, at a distance from you, uninterested in your feelings and your concerns. On the contrary, I am standing there like a great pin-cushion for you to stick pins into me-all the things you want to pray about, all the things you want for yourself and all the worries that are going on at home, are part of the prayer that I am saying, and I couldn't prevent them being part of my intentions in saying the Mass, even if I wanted to.
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