Getting to the Point

I can’t seem to summon up the will to write my usual ‘this week in Madonna House’ blog post, popular as those always are, for the simple reason that I cannot think of anything noteworthy that happened this week here. Sometimes life is just pretty ordinary.

Meanwhile, I wanted to throw in my two cents’ worth about the Pope’s change in a small liturgical rubric, the Holy Thursday mandatum rite of foot washing. The Pope, as his absolute prerogative, has in recent years altered that rite in his own practice of it to include washing the feet of women; now he has formally altered the rubric for the universal Church so that ‘the red’ (the instructions) simply read that the feet of any of the ‘people of God’ can be washed.

Now first, we have to say that Pope’s have supreme and immediate authority to do precisely this kind of thing. Anything in the liturgy that does not touch directly upon the matter and form of the sacrament (e.g. bread and wine for Eucharist, water for baptism, a man for priesthood, a man and woman for marriage, oil for confirmation, and all the associated words that confect those sacraments) is subject to change by the proper authority, and that proper authority is the Bishop of Rome.

So if anyone is thinking ‘the Pope can’t do this!’ they are precisely wrong. This is exactly what the Pope can do, and he has.

And a good thing, too. I have long felt that the rite should change in precisely this way. This particular rite, like all the rites of the liturgy, is symbolic, right? Nobody is actually showing up in church on Holy Thursday because their feet are dirty and need to be washed. People generally attend to that kind of thing in their own homes.

Symbols are not the sort of things that only bear one meaning, or for that matter that bear a meaning apart from and unrelated to their cultural context. And as cultures change and shift, this kind of sub-rite of the liturgy (optional, in fact), is precisely the kind of thing that needs to be evaluated from time to time—is its symbolic meaning still holding? Does it communicate what it is meant to? Is what it is communicating what we really want/need to communicate at this time in the Church?

So the washing of the feet has borne two meanings, related but distinct. One is that of Christ establishing the ordained ministry in the Church, and in that establishing making it clear that it is a call to humble service. The emphasis is on the priesthood as service, and in that emphasis clearly only men should have their feet washed.

But it also is a symbolic reminder of the general call to service in the Church, Christ showing by example that not only priests but all of God’s people are called to wash the feet of their brothers and sisters in humble service. And in that reading, clearly the priest should wash the feet of men and women both.

Two different messages being communicated, right? Both are true, both are good, in fact they are in no way contradictory to each other. It is simply a matter of deciding which one is the more appropriate message to communicate to the Church in our times, and also if there is a risk of a message being communicated that we do not intend and do not believe. Such as, ‘women have no place in the Church’.

At any rate, the Pope has made the decision, and (not that my opinion matters) I happen to agree with it.

That being said, we now have to be vigilant about other messages creeping into the rite that are not particularly helpful or relevant to the liturgy, and that in fact are distractions. For example, “You go, girl! Female empowerment ftw!” Or “Pope Francis is the awesomest Pope evah! Take that, you stupid conservative traddies!” You know, things like that. If those become the focus of this rite, then this optional rite should simply be omitted.

Holy Thursday is one of the principal holy days of the year. Our focus should be first the Lord Jesus and his establishing of the Eucharist, second the Lord Jesus and his establishing of the priesthood as servants of the Eucharist, third the Lord Jesus and his great commandment of love and fourth, the Lord Jesus and his being delivered over into his passion and death.

You may notice a common theme running through where our focus should be in this liturgy. It starts with ‘J’ and rhymes with ‘sneezes’, eh? In fact, that’s more or less a sound principle not only for liturgy but for pretty much anything in life.

And so while I really have thought for some years that this change should be made in the rite, I would now say that it would be good if we could put this controversy behind us and simply make the focus of all our attention be not on the feet being washed, and especially not on the dirt that needs to be washed off (which, frankly, is where our focus is going so often), but on the Washer. Keep our eyes on Him, and the rest of this stuff tends to fall into place by itself.

It is Thursday, and therefore Liturgy time on the blog. I am doing a commentary on the Mass, striving to draw forth how it is a pattern for Christian life and discipleship.

After 22 blog posts covering the Introductory Rites, Liturgy of the Word, and the Preparation of the Gifts, Preface and Sanctus, we are now launching into the Eucharisitic Prayer, the heart of the matter, truly.

It is worth noting at this point that from here on up to the Great Amen in the priest does pretty much all the talking. This is theologically significant. He not only symbolizes Christ in this liturgical moment, but actually is acting in persona Christi. 

The exclusivity of the priestly prayers (i.e. that the laity don’t just join in and pray along with him) means that the liturgy is fundamentally something Jesus does and we receive, something we enter into in the mode of passive reception before active participation. And in fact our deepest entry into ‘full, conscious, and active participation’ lies in knowing that we are primarily graced recipients of the action of the Mass and not the principal actors.

I will be using Eucharistic Prayer I, also known as the Roman Canon, for this commentary. It was until the post Vatican II reforms the only canon we had, the one anaphora, or Eucharistic Prayer, of the Latin Church for over a millennium. That it is not done all that often in many North American parishes is frankly shameful. It is held to be too long, which is ridiculous. 

It is two minutes longer than the other prayers. Anyhow, I don’t want to start ranting about that subject, amusing as that might be for some, but I just want to go on record as saying that it is disgraceful that so many Catholics are deprived of praying the prayer that all their ancestors prayed because we need that extra two minutes for what… another verse or two of Gather Us In?

Anyhow. Back to the Mass! The prayer begins “To you, therefore, most merciful Father, we make humble prayer and petition through Jesus Christ, your Son, our Lord: that you accept and bless + these gifts, these offerings, these holy and unblemished sacrifices…” As we begin the prayer, we consciously address the Father, through the Son. So important, that. God is Father—this in a sense is the whole point of the Year of Mercy, to recapture the awareness of God as Father. And this is done as we approach Him the way He must be approached in truth—through the Son.

The language of humility is important here. We do not approach God upright, with heads held high as if we are His equals. No – we bow, we prostrate, we kneel, we throw ourselves down before Him. He loves us and delights in us, and wants us to know Him as our loving Father… but let us never forget that He is the awesome God, the Eternal, the Mighty, the Holy… and we are frail creatures of dust.

And we bring Him these gifts and ask Him to accept them. 

At this juncture, the gifts are not the Body and Blood—we are still referring to the bread and wine here. That these gifts are ‘holy and unblemished’ of course recalls the whole Old Testament theme of only bringing sacrifices to God that are whole and intact, not the injured and damaged.

Here, it does indeed imply (since the bread and wine symbolically are the offering of the whole Church of its own self, and of each member of the Church of our own selves), that we are free of grave sin as we approach the altar. I know this is a contentious and hard subject these days, but my brothers and sisters, it is really important. The Church and Christ provide every help possible for us to be clean of grave sin, and all are welcome to be present at the liturgy and participate as much as they can, even if they are burdened with sin. There is no harshness, no rejection in this.

But we must not—we simply must not!—approach the altar of God if there is serious blemish, serious disobedience, serious sin in our lives. It is not a matter of censorious priggishness, but of basic integrity and honesty with oneself and with God. It is spiritually damaging in the extreme to willfully flout this, and demand to receive the Eucharist when one’s life is not in accordance with the commands of God, made known to us through His spotless Bride, the Church.

This week in Madonna House was, to put it mildly, packed. It was the week of feasts upon feasts, feast following feast, each with its own customs and beauty and grace.

It began last Sunday with St. Nicholas, of course not celebrated liturgically. But the Turkish bishop saint (or maybe one of his earthly helpers) was up early leaving candy in all of our boot slots. At supper, while we enjoyed the traditional gingerbread cookies for dessert, the man himself appeared to us, although there are some who insist it was just one of our young men guests dressed up in beard, robe, and miter. And he brought gifts again, this time a gift we could give to each other, the gift of intercessory prayer.

We came up with this custom some years ago, that on the feast of St. Nicholas we would receive the name of another person in the community, for whom we would pray for the next 365 days. As Nicholas ransomed the three young women with bags of gold from their poverty and disgrace, so we can ‘ransom’ one another by generous intercession and sacrifice.

So that was Nicholas. Then Tuesday brought Our Lady’s Immaculate Conception, which we celebrated with great beauty of liturgy, decoration, and table. Besides the feast itself and all it means for all creation, it has a special MH significance, as it was the day our first chapel above the dining room was consecrated, and so the day the Lord came to dwell among us in the Blessed Sacrament.

So we celebrated with a festive Mass, brunch, some time off in the afternoon, Vespers and supper, all of it with all the trimmings. I missed the latter part of the day as I was off to nearby Renfrew to give a talk launching the Year of Mercy at some of the parishes there.

A few days of relative normalcy followed, although at this time of the year that normalcy is largely a matter of preparing for the next round of celebrations and feasting. And so today we had my personal favorite feast of the year, Easter aside—Our Lady of Guadalupe.

The day began with the lovely Mexican custom of the mananitas, the morning song. In that culture, women are honored by being serenaded first thing in the morning on their special days. So on the great day of the  Virgen Morena, Reina de Mexico, we tiptoed over to the island chapel where her image had been set in front of the altar on a beautiful blue cloth with many multi-colored vigil lights in front of her. The chapel was otherwise dark, and the effect is just spectacular.

And we had a time of spontaneous singing to our Mother, people chiming in with songs whenever the spirit moved them. Lauds followed, and then breakfast. At that meal, each of us could go to another image of the Guadalupana in the dining room, light a taper before it, and pick a ‘rose’, a paper adorned with a rose pattern on which one of her words to St. Juan Diego was written.

A festive Mass in the evening followed by a fantastic Mexican meal (a  large crew had assembled to make tortillas the night before), and a fiesta where the story of Guadalupe was acted out and then we all had a chance to share our own testimonies of Our Lady’s intercession in our lives.

All of this was going on while we were very busy indeed. The kitchen is a place of constant activity, for example. I personally (oh, OK, with a little help from my friends) made 13 dozen butter tarts one evening, with another evening in the offing to make another batch (smaller, probably just four or five dozen more…).

Besides the usual work in the bush, the men collected greens and Christmas trees to adorn our many houses for the feast, and lights have already begun to go up on the outsides of the buildings. We try to wait for the last minute to do the inside decorating, though. Many guests arrived this week, as we still see quite a number coming through.

My blogging is a bit off-set this week, as I’m about to disappear for a couple of days, off doing a parish mission in the local area. So Wednesday’s blog was yesterday, and Thursday’s is today. Friday’s blog will be Saturday, and then we’re back to normal…

In our commentary on the Mass we have finally reached the Eucharistic Prayer beginning with the preface. The preface is not a part of the Mass that catches many people’s attention especially. If you have a priest who is a decent singer, it may stand out as one of the first longer sung prayers of the Mass, but I have noticed that most priests most of the time opt to recite it, at least in my experience.

The preface, though, along with the Sanctus that follows it, brings out an important dimension of liturgy, one that is important indeed for our living it out in our daily lives. It is a prayer of the Mass that is intensely concerned with where we are in liturgical time, with where we are situated on this wonderful grand wheel of the year that revolves around. Now it is Advent, soon it will be Christmas.

There are prefaces for each season of the year, along with prefaces for some of the ‘mini-seasons’ – the week after Epiphany, the time between Ascension and Pentecost, the last two weeks of Lent. There are prefaces for the various ‘types’ of saints’ days—apostles, martyrs, pastors, virgins. There are specific prefaces for all the major feasts of Our Lord and Our Lady of the year and for solemnities of saints—John the Baptist, Joseph, Peter and Paul. And so on and so forth—I have no doubt missed a couple.

Some of the richest liturgical catechesis we have is found in these prefaces, some of the best explanations of the meaning of the seasons and feasts. Parents raising children would do well to remember them as a resource for religious education.

But beyond that basic catechetical function which is secondary in the liturgy, the preface functions to ground us in the here and the now, that this liturgy which is the eternal action of the Son towards the Father, the eternal act of love and oblation, the very worship of heaven going on perpetually outside of time, is nonetheless happening to us, right now, on December 1, 2015, and we have the preface (Advent I) to prove it!

There is this weaving together of heaven and earth (the Sanctus which concludes the preface and about which I will write next week is the heaven side of the equation), that is so important for our whole Christian consciousness and praxis. Our whole Christian life is to be lived intensely in the now, in the immediate, in the where and the who and the what of our incarnate lives. But this who, what, and where is always opened at the top, so to speak, to the eternal reality of God and heaven and love and worship.

This is why the liturgical calendar has to spill out from the liturgy into our daily lives. This is why in Catholic culture the rhythm of the year is not determined strictly by the secular patterns (September is back to school time! April is tax season! Summer is beach time!) but by the sacred rhythm of time, time redeemed, time ‘open at the top’ to eternity.

And so… Advent wreaths. Christmas trees. Lenten fasts and austerity. Easter breads and eggs. Special meals on the special days, and more ordinary fare on the ordinary days. A candle lit, a bouquet of flowers placed before Our Lady’s image in our homes on her feasts. And other ways of honoring or remembering or sanctifying the home on the other feasts of the year (Nicholas cookies, Lucy bread). Time has been transformed, and we cannot just leave that reality in the sanctuary of the Church; it has to be lived in the domestic Church, somehow. Big ways or small, depending on how we are able.

The preface of the Mass recalls all this to us. We live in time; the liturgy occurs in time; God comes to us in time. But always in time, in liturgy, and in life, there is this upward pull to heaven and eternity. So the preface always starts with where we are right now but ends by mentioning the angels and saints in glory and how, as we contemplate the reality of life lived now, we are called to join with them in singing the great hymn of praise… and that will be next week’s post.