[The Mass in Slow Motion] [Previous] [Next]
I appeal to you by God's mercies to offer up your bodies as a living sacrifice, consecrated to God and worthy of his acceptance; this is the worship due from you as rational creatures. Rom. 12:1
We didn't really finish, last time, about the Offertory at Mass; we just got down to the prayer which the priest says when he puts wine and water in the chalice. There are three more prayers he has to say before he goes back again to the side to wash his hands. I think they are a very good illustration of what we have been calling the dance of the Mass. If you got hold of an intelligent Mohammedan, and asked him to watch this bit of the Mass, and tell you what he made of it, I don't think he would go far wrong. He would say, " The mullah is now holding up a cup, as if he were offering it, with its contents, to somebody up in the air, a little way in front of him . . . Now he is standing there with his eyes downcast, in a humble attitude, as if he were rather ashamed, after all, of his gift ... Now he is looking up at the sky and seems to be scooping down some kind of blessing on the cup, as if to make it all right." He has got the hang of the thing, more or less, from seeing it done in dumb show. You and I, who can read Latin and can find our way about the missal, could tell him that the words which the mullah is using are something very much to the same effect.
The first prayer is, " Lord, we offer thee the cup that is pledge of our salvation, and we ask thy indulgence for it; may it go up, up into the presence of thy Divine Majesty, and carry an acceptable fragrance with it ". We are using the language of the old Jewish sacrifices; under the Mosaic law you were always burning the carcases of animals, or at any rate the fat parts of them; and as you watched the thick black smoke go up to the sky you told yourself, " This fragrance will be acceptable to God "; it was a kind of technical term. You see, the Jews, who had only a very imperfect revelation made to them, were allowed to think of Almighty God as enjoying a good smell of cooking. Not that, as a matter of fact, the smell of fat burning is a particularly acceptable thing to our nostrils; it rather makes one want to open the window. But either the Jews liked their meat very well done, or else they must have argued that when you were cooking something in God's honour you couldn't cook it too thoroughly. The odd thing, I think, is this. In those old Jewish sacrifices the blood wasn't left in the victims that were put on the altar; it was drained away at the altar's foot. And yet we say this prayer about "acceptable fragrance", not over the sacred host, but over the chalice whose contents will be, a few minutes from now, the Precious Blood. I have no idea why that is. Possibly it was just the smell of the wine-wine always smells very strong when you are fasting, as the priest is at Mass-suggested the idea of bringing in that tag from the old Law, though in a different context.
But simply because we don't know-or I don't know-how this particular phrase got into the Mass in the first instance, that is no reason why you and I shouldn't get plenty of juice out of it, when we are simply trying to think of a way in which we can follow the Mass devotionally. How would this do? When we were talking about the priest offering up the sacred host on the paten, we said that we would put ourselves, in imagination, on the paten too, and offer up ourselves to God in union with what the priest is doing. Our bodies, our souls, all that we are, as a gift. How would it be if we accompanied the priest's offering of the chalice with an offering to God of the destiny that awaits us, of the good fortune and the misfortune he means to send us; in fact, of our lives?
You see, that is a perfectly good Hebrew metaphor. It keeps on cropping up in the psalms, " this shall be the portion of their cup ", " the Lord himself is the portion of my inheritance, and of my cup "; the Jews thought of life, obviously, as a cup with some sweet draughts in it and some bitter draughts in it, but God put it to your lips and said, " Here, drink that", with the authoritative tone the doctor uses when he gives you a medicine, and you have no choice but to accept it. I suppose we may say that our Blessed Lord, in taking human nature upon himself, took a Hebrew mind. He wouldn't have been human if he hadn't belonged to one particular nation. And because he spoke one particular language, Aramaic, because he was familiar with the literature of one people above all, the people of the Jews, his thought naturally clothed itself in the Jewish way. And so, when he knelt in Gethsemani, and breathed such a human prayer as staggers us, when we reflect that he who offered it was himself personally God, the language of that prayer, the thought of that prayer, was the language, was the thought of his own people. And he said, " Father, if it be possible, let this CUP pass from me ". The cup of our salvation was a bitter cup for him to drink. And when the priest asks God to accept the cup of salvation, shall we think about the cup which our Lord thought about in Gethsemani, and offer up our lives with it, as he offered up his life in Gethsemani: " Nevertheless, not my will, but thine, be done! "
When I have said that, let me qualify it by drawing your attention to a mistake we are all apt to make when we talk about offering things up. We are all apt to imagine that it only means offering up unpleasant things. It has become a part of our Catholic slang, hasn't it, to talk about " offering it up n in that special way; when the worst comes to the worst, and only then, you decide to offer it up. You offer up the cold you've got, and the pudding you don't like, and the length of the prep you've been set, and the ladders in your stockings, and the fountain-pen that won't write, and the earwig you find in the bath, and the window that rattles in your dormitory, and the other girl bagging the hot-water pipes first, and the noun in E mute that turns out to be masculine after all-offer them up, offer them up. If you want to be really rude to one of your friends who has annoyed you, there's no better way of getting your own back than telling her after Benediction that you've been offering her up. We even think of it, don't we, as a last resort; if you have a toothache you try putting oil of cloves on it, and if that doesn't work you take a couple of aspirins, and if that doesn't work you offer it up. It's a queer way to treat Almighty God, isn't it? Never to think about his will except when we're down and out? Our Lord, in Gethsemani, didn't suddenly remember that his heavenly Father had a will, and that will must be the best. He had been doing his heavenly Father's will, adoring his heavenly Father's will, at every moment of his life, in sunshine and in cloud alike, and his prayer in Gethsemani was simply the continuation of a prayer which had started in the manger at Bethlehem and never stopped.
Of course I know there are some of us who seem to find that the whole of life is just a series of set backs; and if you are like that there is nothing to do but go on offering up the unpleasant things. Those of us who find it less monotonous than that ought surely to offer up to God the WHOLE chalice of our lives, the sweet draughts as well as the bitter. When we get a holiday or a recompense or when we get rid of a chilblain, we ought to offer up those moments to him just as much as the others. At Christmas time we ought to want to share our presents with the Baby Jesus: " What have they given you? Gold and frankincense and myrrh? I got a concertina "-that sort of thing. Sometimes when holy people, especially religious, want to be very kind to you, they give you a spiritual bouquet, so many Masses heard, Communions made, prayers offered, and so many sacrifices for one's intentions. It is always understood that the sacrifices are unpleasant things, isn't it? But I hope if you ever give me a spiritual bouquet, you will include a whole lot of the other sort of thing too; so many ice-creams eaten, so many gramophone records played, so many visits to the pictures, for my intentions. Because then I shall feel you are offering the WHOLE of your lives to God.
I'm sorry to go on and on about that so, but it is a subject I see red about. When the priest stands holding up the chalice in front of him like that, your attitude should be one of holding out your life to Almighty God and offering it to him like that, the bitter and the sweet alike. After all, he is the good Physician, and life is the dose which he tells us to take. You know how, when the doctor orders you a tonic, it comes up labelled: THE MIXTURE, FOR MARY JANE, TO BE TAKEN THREE TIMES A DAY AFTER MEALS. It gives you a sense of pride that the doctor should have invented a special tonic for you, until you find that the other girl in the next dormitory has a medicine tasting just the same which seems to have been made up specially for her. But when we are dealing with Almighty God's prescriptions for us it's not like that; the mixture is made up specially for us, a mixture of pleasant and unpleasant things; no two human lives are ever quite alike. The mixture, for .Mary Jane, no one else. Offer that up, with the chalice; all that is going to happen to you, all that is going to become of you; the fun you are going to have, the love which will one day, please God, come into your life, with the rest. And in what spirit is the offering to be made? We are just coming on to that. The priest bows down with his hands on the altar, looking at the host which carries with it the sacrifice of all he is, at the chalice which carries with it the sacrifice of all that is to become of him. And he says: " Lord, let us meet thee with our spirits humbled, in a crushed frame of mind, and by thee be lifted up.
So may the sacrifice we offer this day to thee, our Lord and God, be the kind of sacrifice thou desirest." You see, we've been making this offering of our lives to God and feeling pretty generous, rather fine fellows, as we did it; and then suddenly we remember how frightfully unimportant a single human life like that must, in a sense, be to him. When we have been trying to get him interested in our ridiculous little affairs, our wholly unimportant births, marriages and deaths, we feel like a child that has just shown its mother some staring, shapeless picture, some terribly bad poem that didn't rhyme or scan or make sense, and expected her to say, "Very nice, darling". The Mass is like that all through, you see; we alternate continually between rushing to God with the consciousness of our needs, and then being driven back into a kind of shame-faced, tongue-tied humility by the thought of God's majesty and our insignificance. Those are the two motifs that constantly cross and recross, making up the pattern of the dance for us. Yes, offer him your life by all means; but don't forget your sense of proportion. Don't forget that it's very much the same situation as when you stoop down and pick up a butterfly that has made a forced landing and isn't feeling too good; " Poor thing," you say, and make as if to stroke its wings. That is how we ought to see our lives, if we are to see things in proportion. We lie there humbled and crushed, and God picks us up ; that is the kind of sacrifice he desires.
And then mere's the third prayer, to the Holy Spirit, rather unexpectedly. At least I suppose it is addressed to the Holy Spirit. " Come, Almighty, Eternal God, the Sanctifier, and bless the sacrifice that waits here to do honour to thy holy Name." If I may be a liturgical bore for a moment, let me point out that this is probably our equivalent, in the Latin rite, for what the Greek churches call the Epiclesis, that is, the invocation of the Holy Spirit. In the Greek rites, that invocation is made AFTER the Consecration, and (according to them) it is at that point, not at the moment of Consecration, that the change in the Elements takes place. We, with our Latin habit of mind, don't think of the Holy Spirit as waiting till the last moment and then suddenly interfering to supernaturalize what is being done. No, we like to think of him as patiently at work all the time, from the very minute when we have finished with the Offertory and the sacrifice is lying there ready. You know how, when you are making the fire at a picnic, you want everything to be quite still until you have got your match lit and the first twigs crackling, and then you want a puff of wind, not too strong or sudden, which will gradually spread the flame, go on spreading the flame, till the fire is really going? So it is with this burnt-sacrifice of ours; we want the Holy Spirit to be gently breathing on it from the first moment when it is really ready, kindling our hearts and making them glow, while he kindles our material offerings of bread and wine into a supernatural flame, which is Christ's Body and Blood.
There, I've given you two whole sermons, each of them lasting about a quarter of an hour, discussing the Offertory; and I suppose the Offertory, in the Mass itself, only takes about three or four minutes. I'm not expecting you to remember all that I've been saying and go through it in your head every time you hear Mass. No, it is enough that your mood, while the Offertory takes place, should chime in with the mood of the dance at that point; three movements, self-oblation, self-obliteration, self-consecration by the invoking of the Holy Spirit.
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