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And let all the people say, Amen. Ps. 105
Cardinal Newman has a passage in one of his works which is generally quoted as his " description of a gentleman." I am not going to give you the whole of it, because you might think it was rather off the point; I don't think Cardinal Newman has given us anywhere a description of a lady. But the first sentence of it is this, " He has eyes on all his company ". That is not a bad thing to remember, even if you are a lady; always to remember who are the other people in the room, or are likely to be within earshot just outside the window, so as not to say the wrong thing; not to go on being boring if everybody is yawning behind their hands; trying as far as possible to bring everybody into the conversation, especially The people who are shy and won't talk at all unless they are given a lead. (I am thinking about the holidays now; here I know you all talk at the same time, which makes things simpler though not always quieter.) And when the priest has got to the end of the Gloria, he seems to get a sort of scruple that he's not behaving quite like a gentleman. He's been thinking so much about the glory of Almighty God, and our need for redemption by our Blessed Lord, that he's forgotten all about Mary Jane. There is Mary Jane behind him, being left out in the cold; and that mustn't be allowed to happen, so he turns round to bring her into the conversation. Before turning round, he bends down and kisses the altar. That is very natural, if you come to think of it; he nearly always does kiss the altar before he turns his back on it-not quite always; he doesn't, for example, before giving Communion. But you will see easily enough that it is a kind of polite gesture, saying to Almighty God, " Excuse me one moment; I must just turn around and say Dominus vobiscum to my friends, or they will think they are being neglected : you know I would like to be thinking about you all the lime, and I am leaving a kiss on the altar to show you that I love you better than anything or anyone else ".
There are all sorts of morals you might derive from that. One is that we ought never to be satisfied with the state of our souls until we find that leaving off saying our prayers is a kind of wrench to us. And one is that if charity towards other people demands it we ought to be ready to stop our prayers at a moment's notice. But we haven't time for morals; we must get on with the Mass. In saying, "The Lord be with you ", the priest puts his hands apart, you will have noticed, as if he were helping to wind off an imaginary skein of wool, and then brings them together again. I don't know what the origin of that gesture is; it may have been simply a way of holding your skirts up in the old days when priests wore long chasubles that reached to the floor. But I think there's an obvious and rather charming significance about this latest movement in the dance. The priest, as he swirls round to make us feel at home, wants to include all of us in his greeting, and so he stretches his hands out wide, so as to include ALL the people who are in church; even the people who have been too lazy to get up early, because he is not allowed to lift his eyes from the ground when he turns towards the congregation, to prevent his getting distractions, so he can't tell whether you are actually there or in bed. But that nice comprehensive gesture of his asks the Lord to be with you, whether you are actually at Mass or not. So there are two reasons why you should feel rather pleased with yourself when the priest turns round and says Dominus vobiscum. It's nice that he should be thinking of us too, even when he is absorbed in an engrossing occupation like saying Mass. And it is nice that he should be thinking about all of us, and spread out his hands like that to shew that he's thinking about all of us. And we answer with the server, mentally, of course, Et cum spiritu tuo. Not ET CUM SPIRITUO, because that isn't Latin and isn't sense; there are two Tu's, ET CUM SPIRITU TUO. And that, as before, simply means " The same to you ".
Then he says Oremus, "Let us pray". And we are a bit inclined to be indignant, like the Lancashire man who was asked, " Wilt thou take this woman to thy wedded wife? " and answered, "Ah coom a purpose ". What's the good of saying " Let us pray , when we are praying already? I know ... But were we? If you find that you are liable to have distractions when you are assisting at Mass, as most people do, and not only I'm afraid when they are assisting at Mass but when they are saying Mass, try this dodge. Make up your mind from the start that whenever the priest says Oremus you will shake yourself and say, "Mary Jane, wake up". That will give you five jumps in the course of Mass; one when the priest goes up to the altar, one just before the Collects, one at the beginning of the Offertory, one just before the Our Father (which is the loveliest bit of Mass, I think) and one before the Post-Communion prayers.
By the time he says Oremus the priest has got his back to you again; he has gone back to the Epistle corner to find the book, because it's got the Collects and Epistle in it, and he doesn't know those by heart. The Epistle end of the altar has two purposes. All the rather less important things are done there, like the Offertory and the washing at the end, and at High Mass the blessing of the incense. And nearly all, but not quite all, of the bits that change from day to day are said at the Epistle corner. Why, I don't know. What is the idea of these Collects? Well, I think the nicest way to think about them is to think about them as a set of telegrams sent to Almighty God in honour of the occasion. You know how sometimes a few old school friends will meet out in Ceylon or Buenos Aires or somewhere to have a dinner, on some day which used to be a special feast day at their old school. And one thing they never fail to do; they always send a telegram to the headmaster to say FLOREAT NARKOVER, or whatever the name of their old school was. Just for once, now that they are together, they must send a joint message of salutation. And I think that is rather what the Collects at Mass are; just for once, now that we are all together, let us send a joint message of salutation to Almighty God; exiles, thinking about home. Some people think that is the reason why Collects are called Collects, because they were used at the collecta, the great meeting of Christian people for worship. I don't know. But there's another reason why I say they are like telegrams-they try to get a lot into a very little space. If you are in the habit of sending telegrams, you know how difficult it is to make them nice and cheap without at the same time making them very obscure. A Collect, like a telegram, ought to say what it wants to say in a very few words, and at the same time to be intelligible.
Unfortunately the books you have with you probably don't succeed in making the Collects intelligible, because they will try to translate them literally, and of course that makes them sound utter nonsense. This morning's was a fairly simple one, and you can't go far wrong with it; this, I think, is the sort of way it ought to be translated: " Lord, we beseech thee, guard this family of thine with a father's unfailing care; as it leans on thy heavenly grace for all its hope, so may it never lack the shelter of thy protection ". Nearly always in the Mass the Collect addresses God the Father, and asks that its petitions may be granted through the merits of our Blessed Lord, at the end.
When I've finished the Collect I don't go on to the Epistle, I start saying another Collect. And you rush through your book, remembering hard not to lick your finger before turning the pages, to find the part where the November saints come, because that's the likeliest guess. And, sure enough, about half way through the Epistle you get it; St. Martin, of course, it's St. Martin's day! The nice Roman soldier who gave away half of his overcoat to a beggar, and in a dream that night saw our Lord wearing it. St. Martin has had bad luck this year, because his feast fell on a Sunday, so we can't say his Mass, we have to say the Sunday Mass instead. Or rather, it is we who have had bad luck; I don't suppose it makes much difference to St. Martin whether we keep his feast or not. But, just to show we haven't forgotten him, we put in a commemoration; we say his Collect immediately after the Collect of the day, and so with the Secret prayer and the Post-Communion prayer of his feast. We ask God that, as we have no legs of our own to stand on, we may be fortified against all dangers by the intercession of blessed Martin, his bishop and confessor. And even then we haven't finished. There was a hermit called Mennas who was martyred in Egypt on November 11, a bit over 1,6oo years ago, and we still say an extra prayer to commemorate him. The Church has a long memory.
Supposing that St. Mennas had been martyred a day earlier, and St. Martin had died a day later, would we just say the Collect of the Sunday and leave it at that? No, if there's no important feast to be commemorated, we throw in two extra Collects for luck. At this time of year, the first of those two is a commemoration of all the saints from our Lady downwards. And the second the priest is allowed to choose for himself, out of a list of thirty-five different prayers which you will find in the missal just before the Mass for the dead. So it's no good asking the nuns beforehand about that, because the nuns can't possibly tell which of those thirty-five Collects I shall say. But I don't mind telling you that my favourite one, the one I usually say on such occasions, is the prayer Pro devotis amicis; and whether that means " for our devout friends ", or " for our devoted friends ", I have never been able to find out. But it's a nice prayer: " O God, who by the grace of the Holy Spirit hast poured into the hearts of thy faithful the gifts of love; grant health of body and health of soul to those servants and hand-maids of thine for whom we implore thy mercy; that they may love thee with all their strength, and with all their love carry out thy will ". If you are given your choice about which Collect you are going to say, it would be very hard to beat that.
All through this bit, the movements of the dance are rather complicated. The priest spreads out his hands when he says Dominus vobiscum, puts them together again, spreads them out again when he says Oremus, puts them together again, and then spreads them out again when he starts the Collect; what are we going to make of all that? Well, I think you can treat it as a sort of " Ready, steady, GO "; the Dominus vobiscum to wake you up, the Oremus to get you ready for action, and then the prayer itself. All through the prayers, as well as all through the Preface and most of the way through the Canon of the Mass, the priest holds his hands like that. I expect really he ought to be holding them wide out and high up, but nowadays the rubrics have reduced it to a mere gesture. Israel defeated the Madianites when Moses, with two friends to help him, kept his hands raised in prayer all through the battle. The point of the gesture is, surely, keeping yourself on the stretch. And the priest when he is saying the Collects is, so to speak, conducting an orchestra; you are the orchestra. He holds up his hands to tell you to keep it going, keep it going! Pray, pray hard; here's the whole world going to rack and ruin, here's the devil loose as he hasn't been for centuries, and the Church having to struggle and shout and starve to keep things going at all; pray hard, keep it up! And then you get to the words, " Through Jesus Christ our Lord ... "and so on; and the priest puts his hands together again. There, that'll do, he says, you can stand down for a bit now. We've put it all in our Blessed Lord's hands; he is up there in Heaven with the Father and the Holy Spirit; he will see us through. And at that point the server mustn't forget to say, audibly and definitely, Amen. That is you, the congregation, saying " Hear, hear" at the end of my speech; that is you putting your signature to the telegram we are sending up to Almighty God, our S.O.S. message praying for the needs of the Church.
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