[The Mass in Slow Motion] [Previous] [Next]
Glory to God in high heaven, and peace on earth to the men that are God's friends. Luke 2
We left the priest last Sunday at the foot of the altar; he has told us to get busy praying, and now he strides away from us; purposefully, like a man who knows what he is about; rather like our Lord going up to Judaea for his Passion, when the Gospels tell us that " his face was set towards Jerusalem ". I think you will find that most priests are walking rather fast, a. good deal faster than their usual pace, over those two or three steps. Indeed, if you could see inside the priest's mind, you would almost say he was running up the steps. It reminds me of some lines in a poem none of you know, a poem called " David in Heaven". It says there " His feet trip without a slip, Going to the altar ". Well, of course it wouldn't really do to run; it isn't a bit easy to run upstairs in a cassock, and then there is generally lace on the end of one's alb, on purpose so that one shall put one's foot through it if one isn't careful. And besides, the motion of that dance is meant to be slow all through. But the priest is mentally running, so to speak; all through that business with the server which we were talking about last Sunday he has been tantalizing himself, as it were, by not going up just yet; very much as some of you would tantalize yourselves, on receiving a really exciting parcel, by insisting on undoing the knots before you looked inside it. The priest rushes up to the altar and kisses it; he can't hold himself in any longer. He didn't kiss it when he went up before, to arrange the things, because he wasn't really beginning the Mass then. Now he goes up and kisses it. And the meaning of that movement in the dance is obvious, I hope, even to the stupidest of us. It is meant to express the great desire we ought to have for God, the desire to get closer to him, get in contact with him, which is the real reason for our saying any prayers at all.
What he kisses, actually, is the corporal, the big white thing folded in nine squares which he takes out of the large green envelope on the top of the chalice. Underneath the corporal is-what? Three thicknesses of altar-cloth. Underneath the altar-cloths is-what? A piece of stone all wrapped up in waxed cloth, so as to be waterproof. That stone has been consecrated long ago, by a bishop; and the bishop in consecrating it fills up some holes in it with-what do you think? Tiny bits of relics of the saints. People used to use relics of that kind rather freely in the .Middle Ages; they used to put them into bridges, for instance, so as to be sure that the bridges held up. I know a very old bridge on the upper Thames where you can still see, in the masonry at the side, a kind of socket where they obviously used to keep the relics of some saint long ago. King Henry the Sixth (no, not King Henry the Eighth; King Henry the Sixth, Wars of the Roses) used to be regarded as a saint before the Reformation, and they kept a relic of his on the bridge between Caversham and Reading, and another relic of his, so I've been told, on the bridge at Bridgnorth. Well, that's all beside the point; nowadays it is only altars that have to have relics in them; but they've jolly well got to. Even a military chaplain carries round with him an altar stone, with relics let into it, and he must never say Mass Without having that stone on the soap-box or whatever it is he is using for an altar. And if you ask why the Church should insist on that rather inconvenient regulation, the simplest answer is this; if he didn't, he would start the Mass by telling a lie.
I hope you all remember that the Mass proper hasn't started yet; all that preparation business we were talking about last Sunday was only preparation really. Now, just as he is going to begin the Mass proper, the priest rushes up to the altar, kisses it, and says," We beseech thee, 0 Lord, by the merits of those saints whose relics are here, and of all the saints, to be indulgent towards my sins ". The saints whose relics are here-why is that so important? Why, because in the very early days, when the Christians at Rome were being persecuted, they used to meet for worship in the catacombs just outside the city. The catacombs are miles and miles of underground passages, which you can still explore with a guide if you go out to Rome. There the Christians used to bury the poor mangled remains of their friends who had been killed in the persecution; and on the tombstones raised over these bodies of the martyrs the Roman bishop used to say Mass. And when the priest, saying those words, kisses the tiny relics tucked away in the altar-stone, he reminds himself, if he has any sense of history, that by that action he is putting himself in touch, so to speak, with the Universal Church that is in Communion with Rome. All altars, all over the world, are one altar really, the mother-altar of Christendom; all altars must have relics in them, so as to remind us that we belong to the martyrs of the first century, and they to us. St. John, in the Apocalypse, says " I saw beneath the altar the souls of all who had been slain for love of God's word"; some people think that is a reference to this habit of saying Mass over the martyrs' tombs-it's as old as that. And when you sec the priest kissing the altar just then, you may think of Christian history, all through these nineteen centuries, as linked up. The Mass is all one, in A.D. 48 or in A.D. 1948; the Mass is all one, in the catacombs at Rome or in the tin chapel. That altar-stone is a kind of keyhole through which you get a glimpse into the whole of our Christian past.
However, we mustn't spend all the afternoon talking about one particular moment in the Mass. Now we come to one of the really exciting points, don't we; the point at which you have to find your place in the missal, so as to shew the girl next to you that you are pretty well up in these things. I mean, if you take any trouble about it beforehand-! bet you don't-you will have your thumb firmly fixed into your missal at the fourth Sunday after Epiphany before the Mass starts.
What does the priest do? He puts on his spectacles. Up to now, all that he has said is something he says, word for word, every day of his life, except in the black Masses when he leaves out the psalm Judica. But now we have reached the point at which the Mass begins to be changeable, the Introit. The Introit I said this morning was that of the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, not the same as St. Winefride's, yesterday: or the Holy Souls on Friday, or All Saints on Thursday. Priests are apt to develop a rather self-satisfied way of saying the Introit, as if to imply, " Now we really are getting down to it ". Do you ever get taken out to lunch at a restaurant by an uncle? And if so, don't you find that he sits down, pulls out his spectacles, and looks through the menu saying or as if to say, "Well, let's see what they are giving us to-day"?
Same old spam of course, but that gesture of his survives from the days of plenty. The Introit is a bit like that; it is a foretaste of what the Mass on this particular day is going to be about. In form, it is a short sentence, followed by the first verse of a psalm, followed by" Glory be to the Father", followed by the short sentence again. The short sentence is what is called an antiphon; if you come into chapel by mistake when the nuns are saying Office, you will find that they say an antiphon at the beginning of each psalm, and repeat it at the end. By rights, of course, the priest ought to say the whole psalm as part of the Introit. That would have meant, yesterday, that before getting on to Kyrie eleison I should have had to say the whole of the 118th psalm, which is 176 verses long. That would have made your breakfast very cold. But the Church, in her great kindness for our insides, has arranged that we should only say the first verse of the psalm, and then call it a day and go on with "Glory be to the Father".
After that, probably, we ought to settle down and sing the Litany of the Saints. That's what happens if you go to Church on Holy Saturday; the Litany is sung, while the sacred ministers all lie flat on their faces on the altar steps. The same thing happens at an Ordination service. The Mass, on solemn occasions like that, has remained unchanged all down the centuries; and probably in very early times Mass was like that every day. If I said the Litany of the Saints every morning after the Introit, even if you were pretty nippy with the responses, that would add a good ten minutes on to the Mass, and breakfast would be getting colder than ever. So the Church has arranged another let-off; instead of saying the Litany we just say the Kyrie eleison, to remind us that the Litany ought to be there. I expect I really ought to be flat on my face. Anyhow, that is the mood we all ought to be in just then; we ought to be grovelling. Perhaps you will complain that we grovelled enough last Sunday. But I must remind you again, till we are all sick of it, that that beginning bit isn't really part of the Mass. The Introit begins the real Mass, and after the Introit we go on to the real grovel. The point is that whenever you approach Almighty God in prayer you ought to be bowled over, at the very start, by the thought of his unutterable greatness. Outside space, outside time, almighty, unconfined, incommunicable, without parts or passions-what can induce Almighty God to take any notice of us, to take any interest in whether we are saying Mass or not? We ought to feel like flies going round on the wheel of a tank; that's how we ought to start Mass, start all our worship of God. Don't start by thinking of him as a sort of cosy Friend waiting to listen to you and wanting to be told how abominably you were treated in geography class; that's all right for later on, but the first thing is to grovel.
So we say Kyrie eleison, which you won't find in your Latin grammars, because the words aren't Latin, they're Greek. I expect you know that in Greece and in the Balkan States and all over the near East-all the part that used to belong to the Turkish Empire and now seems to be getting mysteriously swallowed up by Soviet Russia while we look the other way-Mass is said not in Latin but in Greek. That is true, not only of the Eastern Christians who have been in schism for the last thousand years and don't acknowledge the Pope, but also of the Catholics who live in that part of the world; they are allowed to go on having Mass in Greek because they always have. The Greek habit, apparently, was just to go on saying, " Lord, have mercy on us ". It is only in the Latin Mass that the words Christe eleison have been introduced, so that the whole thing has got into a tidier sort of pattern; we say three Kyrie eleisons to God the Father, three Christe eleisons to our Blessed Lord, and then three Kyrie eleisons to the Holy Spirit. That means four Kyrie eleisons and one Christe eleison for me, two Kyrie eleisons and two Christe eleisons for the server, if we both remember to count right. But the general effect is meant to be just mercy, mercy, mercy-it's not so much that we ought to feel beasts because we are sinners, as that we ought to feel worms because we are creatures; however holy and pious we were, we should still want to start by telling Almighty God that he is Almighty God and we are a set of perfectly ridiculous creatures; when we have got that into our heads we have begun to get the Situation clear.
Well, after that we begin to want a bit of cheering up. And the thing we use to cheer us up is the Gloria in excelsis. Originally, it seems, that only happened on Christmas Day; it is really a Christmas hymn, and that is why it begins with the words the Angels said to the shepherds, " Glory to God in high heaven, and peace on earth to the men who are God's friends." That doesn't, by the way, mean the people who love God; it means the people whom God approves of. The rest of the hymn isn't a particularly Christmassy sort of affair, but that can't be helped; the important thing is that the great bulk of it is an appeal to our Incarnate Lord, as Incarnate, to make things all right for us. In the Middle Ages, it used to vary with the different feasts. On feasts of our Lady, for example, you sang "thou only art holy, thou who dost sanctify Mary, thou only art the Lord, who hast Mary for thy subject, thou only, Jesus Christ, art most high, who dost honour Mary with her crown ". But nowadays it has become one of the unalterable parts of the Mass; and the general point of it, coming where it does, is that we try to cheer ourselves up, after all the grovelling, by reminding ourselves and reminding Almighty God that human nature has been raised to something altogether higher, ever since our Lord took human nature upon himself, and that if we unite our prayers with the prayer of our Incarnate Lord, we can, in spite of everything, make our prayers worth looking at. And when, at the beginning of the Gloria, the priest parts his hands and raises them and then brings them together again with that sort of scooping motion, he is (as it were) inviting our Lord to become Incarnate and come down to earth, so that we may present ourselves to God in the power of his sacrifice. After that, we don't talk to our Lord again till the Agnus Dei.
Originally, as I say, you only got the Gloria on Christmas Day. Then it was put in on all feast days and most Sundays; so that in practice you hardly ever get a Mass without it unless it's a black Mass or a day in Lent, or some other mournful occasion. And that is as it should be, because when it is a mournful occasion we like to go on grovelling, instead of trying to cheer ourselves up. But when we want to feel jolly, as we do on feast days or on Sundays, because Sundays are meant to be jolly in spite of letters home, we recover from the mood of depression we felt during the Kyrie, and start quite gaily on the Collects.
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