[The Mass in Slow Motion] [Previous] [Next]
He sits for ever at the right hand of God, offering for our sins a sacrifice that can never be repeated. Heb. 10
The priest now asks Almighty God to look on the sacrifice which is being made to him " with an indulgent smile ".
When we say our prayers, we sound as if we were talking nonsense nearly all the time. I mean, we are using words not in a literal but in a metaphorical sense. And if you complain that " metaphorical " is a long word and you are not quite sure what it means, I can only refer you to the story Abbot Hunter Blair used to tell, of the Scots minister who explained to the congregation in the course of his sermon that he was their shepherd; and then, bending over the pulpit and pointing at the precentor who sat below he said, " I'm your shepherd, and yon's ma wee doggie ". Whereupon the precentor looked round and up at him and said, " I'm thenkin' I'm no your wee doggie ". So the minister bent over again and said, " Hoots, mon, I was only speakin' metaphoarical ". Well, we are always speaking metaphorical; we talk about God as if he was up in the air, when we mean that he is infinitely greater than ourselves, wholly inaccessible by any human means. We talk about our Lord as sitting at his right hand, when all we mean is that he enjoys that close proximity to him, that high place in his favour, which belongs to the favourite of some earthly king who has the privilege of sitting on the right hand of the throne. And so here, when we talk of God smiling we don't mean that he really has a face, really smiles. We only mean that we want him to accept our sacrifice with the same considerate love with which an earthly father would receive a present, and smile indulgently in doing it.
But then; we are inclined to ask why there's any need to offer such a prayer. How could God refuse the sacrifice of his own Son? And why should an indulgent smile be necessary, as if there was something rather inadequate, even something rather imperfect, about this tremendous gift? Well, in order to understand that, I think you want to read on. We ask him to look favourably on this sacrifice and to accept it, just as long ago he accepted the sacrifice of Abel, and the sacrifice of Abraham, and the sacrifice of Melchisedech. All those remote people in the Old Testament are dragged in here, because we want to remind ourselves that the instinct of offering God sacrifice is an instinct which the human race had long before the Christian dispensation came to explain how the thing could be done. All those old sacrifices of bullocks and goats and rams under the Jewish Law, and, in their way, even the sacrifices offered by the old pagans to their gods when they were trying to do their best, are caught up and contained (that is the point, I think) in this supreme sacrifice which our Lord's Death has now made it possible for us to offer. I expect when you were about six or seven you probably knitted a pair of garters for your father as a birthday present, which were quite hopeless as garters because they wouldn't even meet at the back, or produced some equally inconvenient and embarrassing gift, for which he had to express the most energetic gratitude. Well, suppose on his next birthday you produce a present which is really worth having; a pipe or a hot-water bottle or an umbrella or one of those things you simply can't get nowadays. Possibly as you give it him, you may say, " Remember those garters I gave you when I was a kid? " And his eye will light up with an indulgent smile, thinking of those garters. That's what we do, I think, when we say this prayer; we remind Almighty God of the poor, fumbling attempts we human creatures used to make at sacrifice before we knew any better; we go back to the childhood of our race, and remind ourselves and him that anyhow we meant well.
Then comes a curious piece; one is always coming across curious bits and pieces in the Mass. The priest bends down, and asks God that this sacrifice of ours may be carried by his holy Angel up to his altar in Heaven, there in the very presence of his Divine Majesty. We, he adds, arc sharing the privileges of God's earthly altar here; and with that he bends down and kisses it-he can't help himself; it is so splendid having an altar on earth at all. We are going to do that by receiving the Body and Blood of his Son; and with that he makes the sign of the Cross over the Host and then over the Chalice, as if he wasn't quite certain that they had been blessed enough. And by doing that, he says, we hope to be filled up quite full with benediction and grace; and with that he makes the sign of the Cross over himself, as if to attract back to himself the blessing he has just given.
I say that's a curious bit, because after all why should it be necessary to have Angels carrying this sacrifice of ours up into Heaven? Surely it's there already. What lies before the priest is the Body of Christ, his natural Body which is also in Heaven. The whole thing, of course, is utterly beyond our comprehension, but let me give· you a very crude illustration to "explain what I mean. You know how you can get hold of a bit of looking-glass, or even a table-knife if you have very bad table manners, and hold it so that it will catch the sunlight, and make it flash into the face of the girl opposite you? A thing I hope you never do. Well, there is one face you couldn't flash it into, however much you tried, and that is the face of the sun. Impossible that this bit of the sun's light should go up into the sky and be more part of the sun's light than it is. But aren't we asking the same sort of thing when we ask that the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ should be carried up to Heaven?
Well, the clever people say-and I fancy the clever people may be right-that this particular bit of the Mass doesn't really belong here; it has got here by accident. Probably it used to come earlier on, and perhaps at the Offertory. You may or may not remember that when I was talking about the Suscipe, sancte Pater, the prayer which comes right at the beginning of the Offertory, I pointed out how curiously it was phrased. It talked about the wafer on the paten as "this immaculate host ", as if it had already been consecrated. And I said, that doesn't matter because the Mass is all one action; there's no time in it really, there's no before and after in it really. Well, here we come up against the same point again. The priest refers to the unconsecrated host as if it were a consecrated Host, or he refers to the consecrated Host as if it were still an unconsecrated host, and it doesn't matter in one case or the other. In the Mass, we have pushed ourselves forward into eternity, and questions of time don't bother us.
That's all rather boring. But now we come on to one of the really delightful things about the Mass, though I'm never quite sure why it should be so delightful; I mean the Memento of the Dead. It always makes me rather want to cry. And perhaps the pathetic thing about it is that when we ask God to remember our dead it makes us remember how little we remember our dead. The clever people ask, Why is it Memento etiam, " Remember also "? There's no "also" about it; we haven't been reminding God of anything just before. I think if I knew one of the clever people I would point out what doesn't seem to have occurred to any of them-that the word etiam in Latin doesn't necessarily mean "also". It can mean, " even now ". Don't you think that makes the prayer rather jollier? " Remember So-and-so, O Lord, even now; even now, although he's been dead such a long time; and we, who felt when he died as if nothing could ever make us forget, hardly ever think about him. Other people, other interests have come into our lives; and only now and again some anniversary, or a scene recalling the past, brings back to us, faint and remote, the memory that was once so fresh and so poignant. But you, Lord, are not like that; you are eternal, and you remember the dead even now, just as if they had only died yesterday." I think that justifies the etiam all right.
But you're young, and please God you haven't known yet what it was to lose somebody you loved; or if so you haven't yet known the treacherous feeling of having forgotten them. Let me give you another reason why, from the priest's point of view at any rate, I think this memento of the dead is rather splendid. He looks down at the sacred Host, and sees in it a window between this world and the supernatural world. Of course when I say that you think it is rather irreverent; one shouldn't talk about the sacred Body of our Blessed Lord as a window. But, you know, you oughtn't to be always trying to catch me out in being heretical like that; there's more to be said for my point of view than you think. The APPEARANCES of bread and wine are still there, really there, and they belong to earth. That is one side of the window, if you see what I mean, and the other side of the window is the SUBSTANCE which underlies them; our Lord's Body and Blood, which are in Heaven. So, at Benediction, and at this point in the Mass, I like to think of myself as standing outside a window; not being able to see, alas, what is going on inside, but comforted by the thought that there is an inside. Let me put it like this.
You are passing along the street, and you see a light in one particular window; and you know that that room belongs to a great friend of yours. The blind is down, perhaps, or at any rate you can't see anything interesting from the level of the street. But it gives you a nice cosy feeling to reflect that your friend IS in there, and to imagine her sitting and reading a book, with the wireless on, or scratching the dog's ears. Very likely she isn't in there really; I expect most of your friends leave the light on. But it's good to have the feeling that there's only a sheet of glass between her and you. When we pray for the Holy Souls, we may be quite wrong; the person you are praying for may be in Heaven really. But it's nice to think that our prayers are helping them-and if they aren't, you may be very sure they are helping somebody else-to grow out of Purgatory upwards and onwards into light and peace. You on one side of the window, and your friend on the other; we on one side of the sacred Host, seeing the appearances, our dead on the other, almost within reach, now, of grasping the substance.
Once more, notice, although the priest is allowed to think of particular people, and you are meant to think of particular people at this point, the prayer of the Church adds, "To them, Lord, and to ALL who lie asleep in Christ ". The Church never allows us to be selfish in our prayers; she always makes us think of the other people we didn't know, whose death was a grief, whose memory is a sacred thing, to other people, not us. At the end of the prayer the priest bows his head; some say, because our Lord bowed his in dying.
And then, just when you are feeling all nice and cosy about the faithful departed, an interruption comes. The priest, who has been quite silent up till now ever since the Sanctus, suddenly beats his breast and says in a rather loud voice: " To us also, to us sinners." The point is, I think, that it is time we stopped day-dreaming, and thinking about the past, as we often do when the dead come into our minds. Purgatory is only an interlude; the thing which matters is somehow to get people out of this world into Heaven. So, rousing us with his raised voice, he goes on to pray that we may have some kind of part and lot with God's holy apostles and martyrs. And then he goes off into a long supplementary list of saints' names, which he left out in the first part of the Canon. One very important omission he now makes good except for our Blessed Lady, that earlier list only included the names of men saints. Now we come in for Perpetua and Agatha and Lucy and Agnes and Cecilia and Anastasia; and St. Agnes, we remember with some interest, was only twelve or thirteen years old when she was martyred; so there is some point in asking that we may have part and lot with her.
Well, then there are more headaches for the clever people; why does the priest wind up this prayer by telling God that it is through Jesus Christ he hallows and vitalizes and blesses all these good things? Surely he ought only to be thinking of what lies on the corporal and what is contained in the Chalice; why all these good things? Well, I dare say I'm quite wrong here, but I'm inclined to think that at this culminating point in the sacrifice, just when he is getting on to the Pater noster with its prayer for our daily bread, the priest remembers how the offerings we made, bread and wine, were things to which God gave his blessing in the natural as well as in the supernatural order; they were only specimens of all those good gifts which God showers on us. This is our Eucharist, our thanksgiving, and we are going to praise God not only for the graces he has given us through the Redemption, but for all the blessings we have, sun and new flowers and the fire on the hearth and poetry and friendship and everything that lights up life for us; they are all his gifts, and in offering up the best of all his gifts we want to remember all of them. Through him who redeemed the world, the world itself, with all its light and colour, was made. Through him and together with him and in him we offer to the Father, that Father who is one with him through the bond of the Holy Spirit, all honour and all glory for ever and ever and ever.
No comments:
Post a Comment