Introduction

[The Mass in Slow Motion] [Previous] [Next]

Somebody, I forget who, wrote his reminiscences of the years 1914-18 under the title, One Man's War. I thought I should like to plagiarize that title and make up a kind of meditation under the heading, One Priest's Mass. I suppose it is the experience of all of us that the Mass, with its terrific uniformity unvarying throughout Latin Christendom, varying so little from one feast or season to another-does not impose uniformity on our thoughts. Merely because the words and gestures are so familiar, we don't rest content with their immediate significance; we read fresh meanings of our own into them, treat them as a kind of cipher language in which we communicate our aspirations to Almighty God. It's an odd reflection, then, that when I say Mass or you hear it, though the words and the gestures are the same, and you would think there was no difference at all except the sins we thought about at the Confiteor and the intentions we remembered for the living and the dead, in fact there is a difference; the devotional overtones, the mystical nuances which the words and the ceremonies of the Mass suggest to us are not, probably, the same for you and for me. So I thought I would come clean, and try to analyse, thus publicly, the inwardness of my own Mass; talk about the odd bells that ring in my own mind, the odd vistas that open up to my own view, to close again at once, in the hope that they may have some value for other people. Let me say at once that I know nothing about liturgy, so you won't get any of the orthodox sidelights on the Mass which they give you in the books. Also that I am thinking about Low Mass; it is a long time since I had to sing High Mass, and when I did, the only thought I can remember entertaining was a vivid hope that I might die before we got to the Preface.

The Psalm Judica. What a disconcerting thing it is about the idiom of Hebrew devotion, that the psalms are always saying, " I am upright, I am innocent, I never did anything to deserve this punishment ", whereas we are always wanting to say we are miserable sinners! Here, we prepare for the Confiteor by assuring God that we have walked innocently, and asking him to distinguish very carefully between us and the wicked. When I say this psalm, then, what should I think about? Perhaps, about myself as the representative of the Christian Church, so isolated, so shut away, in idea at least, from all the busy wickedness of the world. The Mass starts with the Church pushing the world away from her; the lodge is tiled, there are no profane onlookers, it is a cosy family party, just ourselves.

Then the Confiteor; that is more personal. Not that, I fancy, we are meant to be thinking precisely about our sins, rather about our sinfulness; not so much the sinners we are as the sinful sort of people we are; with no right to claim the sort of intimacy we are going to claim in corning before God. Well, we shall have to remember that God is Almighty and merciful, and go ahead as best we can. And then that splendid ceremony of kissing the altar as you say Quorum reliquiae hic sunt. A keyhole through which you look right back to the catacombs; Mass over the tombs of the martyrs; the Church unageing, her days bound each to each by natural piety.

The Introit gives you a nice sense of squaring your shoulders and opening out a bit; you have forgotten the fears and scruples that assailed you at the foot of the altar; you crash into the liturgy of the day in a good hearty voice. And then suddenly the old trouble comes back again, only I think in a different form. Sins or no sins, what are you, a man, a creature, that you should be standing up and talking to God like this, as if a conversation with him were the most natural thing in the world? Back you go to the middle of the altar, feeling an utter worm; Kyrie eleison, again and again, begging his pardon for your ridiculous self-sufficiency in imagining, even for a moment, that you had a right to stand up straight, instead of burying your head in your hands. You remind yourself, with the Gloria, of what God is, in a stammering, apologetic sort of way, so that you find yourself thanking him for being so glorious-not a thing you do as a rule. And from that you turn to a paean of praise in honour of our Blessed Lord, hiding behind him, covering yourself in him, to get the technique of your approach to Almighty God right after all. And so you go back to your post at the side, a little reassured, and start again with the Collects.

I rather like a lot of Collects. It's nice to have a lot of different subjects of conversation when you are going to talk to God. When people ask us to say a prayer for some particular intention, our first reaction is perhaps to think it a nuisance. But surely we ought to regard each intention as a new excuse for claiming God's attention, like a child that thinks it fun to be sent on a message to its father, because it is so splendid to be allowed, for once, to interrupt him in his study. So with these obscurer saints, these much-thumbed imperatas; an excellent opportunity for making our conversation with God last longer. The Collects we ought to think of perhaps as SOS messages expressing, in as brief terms as possible, the needs of the Church. Then, for the Epistle, there is a relaxing of strain. The Epistle is a letter, written quite a long time ago, to us; and we read it out in a leisurely way. For once it is the only part of the Mass of which you can say that-you stand at ease. Your hands escape from their rigid discipline. It is an interval, a pause; accidentally protracted by one or two bits of liturgy which were so obviously meant to be sung that they do not go naturally at Low Mass. Even the Sequences, beautiful as they are, seem to cry out for the music; they are not reciting pieces.

And now you have an expedition to make; a sort of Polar expedition to the unvisited wilds at the north end of the altar. Nothing is ever said or done there, except for the reading out of the words of life, extracts from those precious fragments which tell us what happened when God came to earth. Accordingly, we brace ourselves for this unaccustomed journey by a special dedication of our lips, those unclean lips of ours which are responsible, all day long, for so much gossip, uncharity, unkindness, grousing, flattery, boasting, and perhaps even profanity; they need a kind of salve before we take the words of life on them. And not only our lips, you will notice, but our hearts. 

That's the tragedy of it, that the Gospel never seems to grip us . . . you see, we know it by heart. What an odd phrase that is, isn't it, " knowing a thing by heart ". Because, when we are talking about the Gospels, that's just the way we don't know them. Still, one reads the Gospel, and kisses the book at the end, and hopes that somehow the message of it will steal through those lips into the heart which has read through it so coldly, so inattentively.

Then, if it is one of those big days, you get the Credo as something of a relief; if charity has burnt so low, there is still faith anyhow; the Credo, with those phrases at the beginning which send your mind, sometimes, rocketing up heavenwards without very much consciousness of what it is you are saying; and the splendid dramatic moment of Et homo factus est, with the noise of kicking and scraping behind you, where rheumatic knees are being laboriously bent in honour of God made Man. And then follows the odd Dominus vobiscum and Oremus which isn't followed by a prayer; I suppose it once came just in front of the Secret prayers, or something like that. Standing inconclusive as it does, it has the suggestion of being a mere excuse for taking a peep behind you, and seeing that the congregation are still there. Good, they are. This is where the congregation get their look in. The Offertory is, in theory, the whole congregation surging up into the sanctuary and presenting you, the priest, with the bread and wine, their contribution to the mysteries.

Actually, in their name, a small boy emerges from the background, probably with hiccoughs; at first sight you are tempted to regard him as an unwelcome distraction, then you remember that he stands there in the name of the congregation, offering you unconsecrated wine, and saying, " I suppose this wouldn't be any use?" Then the Lavabo, with the psalm in which you start protesting your own innocence, just as at the Praeparatio. Once more, the lodge is being tiled; the catechumens are supposed to be going away; once more we remind ourselves that we are a family party. The Secret prayers are said over the unconsecrated bread and wine, and are always about them. It is as if we had to whisper them in our embarrassment, feeling, like the boy with the five loaves again, how ridiculously inadequate they are as the raw material for a miracle; just as everything we give to God is ridiculously inadequate to the purposes for which his grace makes it effective. You will often find that apologetic note in the Secret prayers.

Then comes the first of those three sudden emergences from silence into sound, with the words Per omnia saecula saeculorum, that lend to the Mass, from the unliturgical layman's point of view, a good deal of its atmosphere of mystery. When you hear it from the congregation, you feel as if the priest was being torn between two different instincts; one of which tells him that what he is saying is much too sacred to be said out loud, while the other tells him that it is much too important not to be said out loud-first one instinct, then the other, getting the mastery. From the priest's own point of view, I think this first Per omnia has an evident psychological value. The mind tends to accompany the voice, by force of habit; and the mere fact of breaking out into speech after a happily-arranged preface of silence encourages the mind to an outburst of praise, just at a moment when it is apt to have gone off day-dreaming. And I think it has a symbolic value in that way. We ought, obviously, to be praising God at every moment of our lives. Obviously we aren't. Consequently, when we do start praising God it is right that we should do it in a sort of nervous scurry, like a man who has just remembered that he has got a train to catch. The Sursum corda which invites us to praise incites us, at the same time, to contrition; how terrible that our hearts should be continually grovelling, and have to be hoisted up in this almost undignified way on the rare occasions when we really do praise God!

And then the splendours of the Preface, with the various ranks of Angels flashing past us like the names of suburban stations as we draw closer to the heart of a great capital. The holy Angels, I think, have a knack of drawing up one's mind to God, by being at once so awe-inspiring and at the same time so obviously inconclusive; the attitude of the Angel in the Apocalypse, who will not let St. John worship him and bids him worship God instead, is permanently their attitude. And at the same time, the glimpse we catch of those Angels who veil their faces before the throne warns us that the loud, confident tone in which we cried Sursum corda must be modified a little as we reach the threshold; that slight drop of the voice for the Sanctus just chastens our praises with a salutary touch of awe.

On that threshold, we pause a little, to remind ourselves that we are not alone. In case we were in danger-the younger of us, anyhow, fresh from the splendour of ordination-of feeling self-important about the tremendous office we hold, the tremendous business we are transacting, we reflect that the man who stands here is only a priest of the universal Church; at the moment when he consecrates, he is the particular unit in whom her prayer is being manifested. He is the particular sentry who happens to be posted at this particular spot, under orders from his Bishop. He must think of himself as an inconsiderable unit of this great army whose whole cause now, all the multitudinous needs of the Church of God, he proceeds to recommend to God: then, and not till then, he may make his private Memento. A sudden close-up; for a moment, the features of one particular individual, or one particular situation, disentangle themselves from the general muddle God's world is in, and stand out clearly before your mind; there, that is enough, we shall not add to the value of the Mass by interrupting it with our woolgatherings. . . . Our intention is not the only intention; each of the worshippers behind us has a private one; et omnium circumstantium, take just as much notice, Lord, of theirs as of mine. But, after all, we are all communicantes, we are all parts of this tremendous whole, the Church; and we all share the intercessions of the saints, who are the Church's property. " Whether Paul, or Cephas, all are yours "; then the familiar string of names; Italians, most of them, what does it matter? All are yours; and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's; let us get on with the Mass.

You hurry on to the Consecration, after a few more last-moment gestures, as if to make the still unconsecrated elements less unworthy of what they are going to become. And then, with the Consecration itself, you go off on to a quite different tack. You stop making up prayers, thinking up reverential epithets, piling strings of participles together; you don't ask God for anything or apologize for anything or try to induce any attitude or any frame of mind in yourself; you simply stand there and record a piece of history. In recording that piece of history, it becomes necessary to recite some words our Lord used; and so, as if absent-mindedly, almost as if unintentionally, you do what you came there to do; or rather, you don't do it, you suddenly pull yourself together and realize that our Lord's words, even relaid on such lips as yours, have done it. A moment ago, you could move your hands quite freely; now, an extraordinary sort of paralysis has fallen on them, so that it is impossible to separate the thumbs from the index fingers. Christ has used you to do a miracle, and everything has become quite different. You elevate the Host, the Chalice; or are they trying to fly upwards out of your hands? You hardly know, it is all so strange.

Anyhow, you start offering this precious Thing that has fallen between your hands; you connect it with this and that, the mysteries of our Lord's life, the Old Testament sacrifices, the ministry of the Angels in Heaven, the expectation of the faithful dead; another string of saints' names occurs to you; but all this you do in a half-dazed way, still thinking about what it is that lies before you; and then, boldly, you take up Host and Chalice together and hold them up for a breathless moment. And then suddenly you are talking out loud again, and feel the ground sure under your feet as you find yourself saying the Pater Noster. I suppose each of us has a clause or a phase of the Mass at which, if it wasn't for the trouble and confusion it was going to cause, he would like to die. Mine is the Pater Noster. It is, to me, the moment in the Mass at which one is most consciously, most fearlessly, talking to God.

Almost immediately afterwards, at the end of the Libera nos, we start doing something we haven't yet done in the Mass since we said the Gloria, except perhaps momentarily in a Collect; we start talking to Jesus Christ. The sacrifice is over, the banquet has begun; and we do what we can tu reconcile ourselves to the bewildering fact of his condescension to our needs. A te numquam separari permittas-that is the kernel of it; when that is said, all is said. So the priest gives you Communion. If the priest is yourself, you are hardly conscious of that. You are receiving, not giving. As for the Communion of the Faithful at least if there are many-how difficult it is not to feel this as an interruption in " my Mass! " But of course there is no such thing as " my Mass "; we are ministers before we are priests, and it is for us to wait (hours, if need be) on our ministering.

And so the Mass comes to an end, in a whirl of purifications and postscripts, that do not seek to impress themselves deeply on the mind; one has not enough capacity left for receiving impressions. There is a tag which occurs frequently in the Old Testament, and once in the New," And every man went to his own house "; that is what we do at the Ite missa est; the coming of Christ to our souls is a thing too intimate for liturgy; we must be alone. As the priest gives the Blessing and says the last Gospel, he is only (as it were) covering his retreat; we know it is all over, really.

So much of drama, every day of our lives; and we, how little we are thrilled by it! 

[The Mass in Slow Motion] [Previous] [Next]