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My feet are set on firm ground; where thy people gather, Lord, I will join in blessing thy name. Ps. 25
We've just got on as far as the incense. I don't think we'll talk about that, because it only comes in sung Mass; and personally I never find it possible to devise any system for attending a sung Mass devoutly all the time; the choir make so much noise that I can't hear myself pray. I thought instead I would give you a few minutes of moral theology. Every Catholic is bound to hear the whole of the Mass every Sunday. But how much is the least that is allowed to count, in the sense that if you've heard that much of the 8 you needn't hear the 9?
As we all know, at least I hope we do, the Mass can be divided into three bits, a beginning, an end, and a middle, and you haven't heard Mass at all unless you have heard two of those three bits, and one of the two bits you heard was the middle one. The third bit is pretty clearly defined; it is from the ablutions to the end of the Last Gospel. If you have got to cook the breakfast, or are in a hurry for any other legitimate reason, you can go as soon as the priest holds out the chalice towards the server -- or, if there are Communions, as soon as it is clear that the priest has finished his own Communion. But what ordinarily worries us is not the question of leaving too soon. It's a much more debatable point where, exactly, the first break in the Mass comes. The point, I mean, after which you cannot claim to have heard Mass at all, even if you stop on to the very end; it's too late. I have heard it put as early as the beginning of the Gospel; I have heard it put as late as the Sanctus-but that isn't an opinion I would like to stake my chances of going to Heaven on. It always seems to me the safest principle to lay down is this: The dividing line comes at the collection. By that I mean the first collection, not the second, if there are two. Not that the collection is a particularly important incident in the Mass; but it wouldn't be sensible to send the man round with the plate till everybody was there who was going to be there, would it? And because the collection normally starts with the Offertory (when there is somebody different from the server to take it up) I should say that the first of the three bits was down to the Offertory, without bothering very much about whether the Offertory was just beginning or whether they had already got to the incense.
May I say two things about all that? One is, do try and get out of the habit of saying " I was late for Mass one Sunday " when you go to Confession. It may simply mean that you committed a sin of irreverence by turning up in the middle of the Epistle; it may be that you broke the law of the Church by not turning up till the Ite missa est. Do try and get into the habit of telling the priest WHAT HAPPENED; nothing is more annoying in the confessional than being told that the penitent has been careless about other people's property, and being expected to understand that he means burning down one or two hay-ricks. In this matter of hearing Mass, it's so much better to say, "One Sunday I only came in to Mass while they were saying the Epistle ", or "the Ite missa est", as the case may be, and then we all know where we are, and no questions are needed.
The other thing is this; don't start out with the intention of being late for Mass, anyhow on days when Mass is of obligation. However boring the sermons are, don't time yourself so as to miss the sermon. Don't deliberately miss part of the Mass; the Mass, as I've been trying to explain, is all one whole thing, one whole action, not just a collection of spare parts. You ought to want to live through it with the priest. And it is a sin of irreverence, for which you are entirely responsible, if you MAKE PLANS for missing part of it. Moreover, you know perfectly well that you really know where your hat is, that the buses don't run at the proper intervals on Sunday, and that the church is about two minutes' more walk than you always pretend. Consequently, in your effort to avoid the boring sermon, you are very liable to roll in just as the warning bell rings for the Consecration; and then you come to Confession and ask me, " Please, Father, was that a mortal sin?" If only people would take the trouble to avoid deliberate venial sins, the world would be a much happier place. If you'd started out for Church meaning to be in time, you would have been there for the collection, and you would now be confessing a venial sin of irreverence, if that. Instead of which, here we are wasting our time in the confessional, keeping all the other people waiting, while we try to decide whether it was a mortal sin; whether the conductor slipping in to the Corner house to have a quick one was the sort of accident you could have foreseen or the sort of accident you couldn't have foreseen. Do try to think of the Mass as one single experience which you want to share with the priest. It's not like listening to the news on the wireless, which is all different items, so that you can say " I think we may as well switch it off, now, they've got on to the football results ". It's as if you were to say, " I think I shall read this detective story, but I mean to skip the first two chapters and the last three ". The Mass is a whole.
Well, that's enough about that; let's get on to where the priest washes his hands. I always wonder whether the faithful think the clergy never wash at home, they do so much of it in public. Bishops are at it all the time. I dare say originally it was quite a practical sort of wash, but there's not much point in it now unless the thurifer has been eating butter-scotch in the sacristy and made the chains sticky. But even if it's only a survival, I think it makes an awfully good symbol. Washing your hands gives you the feeling of having finished with the last thing and going on to the next; of having something behind you that's over and done with, something new stretching out before you. I think you get that sense best after a long railway journey, when you've reached the place you are staying at and go up to wash. It isn't merely getting your hands and face clean that gives you a good feeling, even if you have been drawing your initials in the damp on the carriage-window. It brings home to you, somehow, the sense of having arrived; and on the top of that, the sense that there is going to be a meal before long. Now, in the Mass we are trying to put the dust of the world behind us for a bit, and going into a king's presence to share a royal banquet; we shouldn't feel comfortable about that if we hadn't at least made some gesture of preparing ourselves for it. Only a gesture, perhaps-after all, we don't always get quite all the ink off our hands before lunch, do we ?-but it's better than nothing.
When we were talking about the priest's preparation, I was saying that it ought to make us feel shut off from the wicked world, shut in together in a cosy family party. And at the Lavabo I think this feeling ought to return to us, even more strongly. For this reason; in the primitive Church the catechumens, that is, the people who hadn't been baptized yet, but were learning to be Christians, were apprenticed to the job of being Christians, only stayed till half-way through the Mass; after the sermon they were turned out. From the Offertory onwards the Mass was to be entirely a family affair. It's true that under the modern discipline of the Church we don't turn non-Catholics away. But I think the positive side of that feeling ought to be with us still; as the priest goes to wash his hands we ought to be rather stimulated by the sense that this is our show; there is a business-like feeling in the air; if I may use a very indelicate comparison, it's like when somebody is going to fell a tree or something of that kind, and he spits on his hands as he faces up to it. Not that I would ever want any of you to do anything so unladylike; but when the priest washes his hands at Mass we might, I think, be allowed to think (somewhere at the back of our minds) of the workman spitting on his hands as he really gets to work. Once more, as at the Preparation, we say to ourselves, " Now we're off". Let's just have a look at what the psalm says.
" With the pure in heart I will wash my hands clean, and take my place among them at the altar, listening there to the sound of thy praises, telling the story of all thy wonderful deeds. How well, Lord, I love thy house in its beauty, the place where thy own glory dwells! Lord, never count this soul lost with the wicked, this life among the bloodthirsty; hands ever stained with guilt, palms ever itching for a bribe! Be it mine to guide my steps clear of wrong; deliver me in thy mercy. My feet are set on firm ground; where thy people gather, Lord, I will join in blessing thy name."
When I was talking to you, only you've forgotten about it by now, about the psalm Judica at the beginning of Mass, I was saying that some people think the situation there is that of some Levite who has been exiled from his country on a false charge, but now has been acquitted; and the psalm represents the joy he feels at being allowed to go back to the altar of God again. Curiously, I feel it in my bones-! may be quite wrong-that in this psalm too the situation is that of a man who has been falsely accused, and then acquitted. I think he had been accused of taking a bribe, either to give a false judgement or else to give false evidence in a law-court; there had been a murder trial, and it was Thought that the murderers had bribed him to take their side. Then, somehow, it is all cleared up, and he can shew his face again. Do you sec how much more point that gives to the whole thing; " Lord, never count my soul lost with the wicked, this life among the bloodthirsty, hands ever stained with guilt, palms ever itching for a bribe." It's all right now, his character is re-established; he will wash his hands with the pure in heart-they will no longer shrink from him, as if they expected to see blood in the basin-and then take his place among them as they form a semi-circle round the altar. The old translation says, " I will compass thy altar, O Lord ", which, of course, is nonsense; there was no mulberry-bush business about the Jewish altars any more than about ours, you didn't go round and round them. No, the author of the psalm is going to be one of the ring of worshippers that stands round the altar; he won't be ashamed any longer to be seen doing it.
Well, I don't suppose most of you have had the experience of being wrongly suspected of doing things you hadn't done; probably rather the other way. You may have been told you were talking in the dormitory when you were really only humming, but I don't suppose you've known what it was to be in real disgrace, and then to be proved innocent after all. But you can imagine something of the thrill of it. And I think we, at this point in the Mass, ought to feel something of the same thrill, not about being innocent and proved innocent, but about having been guilty and now being forgiven. We are so constantly told, aren't we, to go on and on about our sins, weeping over them and never forgetting them; I wonder if we don't need more encouragement to rejoice, to feel really bucked, that our sins have been forgiven? And yet we know that they have been forgiven, through the merits of Jesus Christ. Don't you think, when we see the priest washing his hands and preparing to take his place among the clean of heart, we ought to try and realize how forgiven our sins are, how utterly put behind us, washed away like the dust of railway-travel?
And then the priest, who has been marching to and fro and turning round and bowing to the altar in a rather pleased, forgiven sort of way, comes to a halt again in the middle and bends down to say that nice, comprehensive prayer, the Suscipe sancta Trinitas. Once more, as at the beginning of Mass, he can't remind himself that we are a family party, shut out from our sins and from all the noise and dust of the world, without reminding himself that we unite, in offering the Mass, not only with all faithful Christians all over the world, but with the dead too. And especially those glorious dead, the saints, who are worshipping God at his heavenly altars as we at his earthly. So he bends down and asks the holy Trinity to receive this sacrifice of ours; we are offering it primarily to commemorate our Lord's Passion, Resurrection and Ascension, that trinity of mysteries round which the Mass revolves. But at the same time we are doing honour to the blessed saints, Blessed Mary ever-Virgin, St. John the Baptist, the holy apostles Peter and Paul, them and all the saints, all the lot of them. Their salvation is assured now, so we offer it for our salvation and in their honour; we would like them to remember us in their prayers at the throne of grace, as we, here, remember them with thanksgiving. With these, the pure in heart, we will form one single ring about the eternal altar.
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