(1/3) This is My Body: Pattern for the Mass, the Sacraments, and the Church

This is the first of three sermons delivered on the occasion of the annual Forty Hours Devotion of Saint Nicholas Parish in Walnutport (Northampton County, Diocese of Allentown). The collection is called, This Is My Body: Pattern for the Mass, the Sacraments, and the Church. The contents are presented 99.8% as-delivered.

For the sake of the original audience, by the third night I had developed an outline of the schema which I printed on ticket paper; the smaller portion of the ticket contains a memento of the occasion. I display it below for your own clarity.

Knowing that these sermons are hereby available to a larger audience, I welcome, and preemptively resent, any critique.

Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Eucharist are considered the “Sacraments of Initiation,” because they make Catholics of their recipients. These Sacraments involve the invocation of the Holy Spirit by the laying on of hands. In Baptism, the priest or deacon extends his hands to sign the child with the Cross. In Confirmation, the Bishop extends his hands over the Confirmandi to beg for an outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon them, which he seals by applying Sacred Chrism on their foreheads.

When it comes to the Eucharist, the priest extends his hands over the gifts, calling down the Holy Spirit to transform them into the Lord’s Body and Blood in a moment called the epiclesis, the “calling-down-upon.” Often this has been marked by ringing of bells, previously to alert the faithful and the musicians it was taking place. What the General Instruction of the Roman Missal calls the “Consecratory Epiclesis,” “implores the power of the Holy Spirit, that the gifts offered by human hands be consecrated, that is, become Christ’s Body and Blood” (79).

There is a second moment in which the priest invokes the Holy Spirit: it takes place after the Consecration, and is called the “Communion Epiclesis.” His hands are extended throughout the Eucharistic Prayer, from after the Consecration onward. Here, the same Holy Spirit Who has incarnated the Divine Son in the womb of the Virgin Mother, the same Holy Spirit Who has transformed man-made bread and wine into that very Divine Son, now descends again so that “the unblemished sacrificial Victim to be consumed in Communion may be for the salvation of those who will partake of it” (79). 

Salvation is shown to be more than a divinely weighted blanket being thrown over us; it is, rather, our being born from above and from within, by the same Holy Spirit. He makes us a “new creation” restored to unity with the Triune God, with the Communion of Saints, within ourselves, and with all of creation.

As Our Lord makes bread and wine His Eucharistic Body by the Holy Spirit’s power, by that same Power He makes us members of His Church: “Believe what you see, see what you believe and become what you are: the Body of Christ” (St. Augustine).

Only once in a lifetime can one receive the first two Sacraments of Initiation—only once can one be baptized and confirmed. Note for anyone who became Catholic after having been “confirmed” in another Christian denomination: no other church save the Orthodox consider Confirmation a Sacrament, which is why we confirm converts. The Orthodox do chrismate converts from Catholicism, though as a sign of unification with them and not as a repudiation of the validity of our sacraments—at least depending on who you talk to. The Catholic Church does not re-confirm converts from Orthodoxy.

As for the Eucharist, of course, one should receive that Sacrament of Initiation worthily and often. Perhaps only the first reception of Holy Communion is an “initiation” as such, while every subsequent worthy Communion serves to deepen our identity. Hence our ongoing need to keep clean the Temple that would receive God Himself as its Guest—which is where we will pick up tomorrow.

Peace, Penitence, and Prayer

The second of October is the memorial of the Holy Guardian Angels. One of the first prayers Catholics (and others) learn: 

Angel of God, my Guardian dear, / to whom God’s love entrusts me here, / Ever this day be at my side, / To light, to guard, to rule, to guide.

That God creates a custom pure-spirit protector for human beings is not a mandatory Catholic belief, but it is not a mere fable either. Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition refer to angels who gaze upon the heavenly Father’s face (Mt 18:10), yet have enough eyes to look out for us—more eyes than a mother, a teacher, or a nun.

Writer Mary Farrow penned a fantastic piece on Guardian Angels, quoting a professor who quoted a Cardinal on Guardian Angels’ three main areas of interest concerning us: peace, penitence, and prayer. When they’re successful, the universe is better off, because, according to St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas, angels govern the processes of the entire universe, in ways known and unknown.

Since the more recent sexual abuse reports, many dioceses, including our own, have resorted to praying the Prayer to St. Michael after Mass (his feast was observed recently—29 September), hearkening back to a series of prayers once recited after every “Low” (recited) Mass. The series became known as the Leonine Prayers because Pope Leo XIII introduced them in 1884. They were discontinued in 1965, but in some places they’re making a comeback. Unofficially, they were for the conversion of Russia, but they have 1,001 uses.

Archangel Michael has the pleasant job of “casti[ng] into hell Satan and all the other evil spirits who prowl throughout the world seeking the ruin of souls.” The name Michael is Hebrew for “Who is like God,” because Satan wants to be like God and Michael reminds him he can’t be. Like Michael, however, Satan is a powerful pure spirit, except Satan devotes his towering intellect and will to diminishing people’s peace, penitence, and prayer.

When prayer and penitence go, peace follows suit. When priests stop praying, they start predating. When they stop repenting of their prideful, greedy, and lustful choices, their various victims lose peace. So we appreciate all the more St. Michael and his minions. 

Of course priests aren’t the only ones who entertain the deadly sins enough that temptations lead to actions: whosoever qualifies for a guardian angel, sure as heaven needs one.

I mentioned to a parishioner that today’s readings concerned marriage and the parishioner said, “I had a joke for you on that, but I forgot it.” It may be indiscreet to mention the parishioner’s name, but I will say it rhymes with “Snarl Tarzan.”

What’s no joke is the current situation of marriage and family life— though to be honest, it wasn’t always taken seriously in biblical times either. Why else would Moses have proposed conditions for divorce? Why else would Jesus have gone off as He did about the Creator’s intention for marriage? The evil spirits still prowl around the world seeking the ruin of souls. They prowl for bodies as well, because, as long as people are living, bodies and souls are together.

Since this diocesan Year of Real Presence began, I‘ve been considering how Jesus’ words, “This is My Body,” apply to every aspect of human life, including how we speak them sinfully. The many forms of self-worship drive people from God, from each other, and within themselves. What God has joined, let no one put asunder.

Commentators have noted the proximity of Jesus’ words on marriage to those on children. We connect angels with children often enough (cf. Mt 18:10). We also think of dead people, but they’re not angels either. None of us is. People often say, “I’m no angel,” when they want to excuse themselves from sin. 

We have to look somewhere for the root of our malady. When individuals go sour, marriages and families (and more) go sour. That’s no judgment on anyone, because God and the person know best. God’s always honest to us, but we’re not always honest to God.

Satan the home-wrecker wants to interrupt our awareness of God’s Presence with temptations, and he really wants us to interrupt our actions with sins. (Temptations aren’t sins, remember!) Satan wants peace, penitence, and prayer to end. He wants to harm children and the adults they become, and he will encourage us to find ways to do that. He wants bodies and souls to break up in one way or another.

If I But Touch

Most Thursdays our parish has Eucharistic Adoration from after the 7:30am Mass to 10:00pm, interrupted by the 12:10pm Mass. While giving the Benediction last night, I touched the monstrance to my forehead before resting it on the tabor (the platform for the Blessed Sacrament), and then knelt behind the altar for the Divine Praises, all the while touching the legs of the tabor. During our simple Thursday night offering of Compline and Benediction, this is what I normally do.

While I had no palpable spiritual experience, I was just then reminded of that one Gospel account:

There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years. She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors and had spent all that she had. Yet she was not helped but only grew worse. She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd and touched his cloak. She said, "If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured." Immediately her flow of blood dried up. She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction. (Mk 5:25-29).

There are retreat experiences built around that Gospel in which a cloth is draped about the monstrance, and participants are invited to approach the altar and grasp the cloth. I know of a woman who is fond of reaching out during Eucharistic processions to touch the celebrant's humeral veil. In times of testing, many people will finger their Rosary or Jesus Prayer beads and scarcely get a word out; but God sees and hears them.

Call them (or me) flaky, but there is something valuable about such pious activities: the deep desire for physical contact with things divine. The sacraments accomplish that very thing in the properly-disposed soul; but we also can use sacramentals such as Benediction, as well as retreats, to arouse devotion and affection.

Of course there is the perennial temptation to look inordinately to sacramentals, affording them more attention than the tangible, divinely instituted, efficacious signs of grace. Presuming a person's fidelity to the sacraments, let them have their legitimate way with sacramentals. They enkindle a deeper faith, hope, and charity in the hearts of their partakers. They fill the interim between Masses--the "human meanwhile"--with longing for the times of fulfillment.

Reading "The Wreck," Stanzas 2-3

Our consideration of "The Wreck of the Deutschland" continues with the second stanza:

I did say yes
O at lightning and lashed rod;	10
Thou heardst me truer than tongue confess
Thy terror, O Christ, O God;
Thou knowest the walls, altar and hour and night:
The swoon of a heart that the sweep and the hurl of thee trod
Hard down with a horror of height:	15
And the midriff astrain with leaning of, laced with fire of stress.

Hopkins recalls his conversion to Catholicism as a tumultuous event ("lightning and lashed rod," "terror," an event that set his heart reeling.  Its effects were physical; he was apparently "bent out of shape."  Swoon, sweep and hurl suggest the violence of a shipwreck, to which the reader will be treated in due time.

"I did say yes"; "Thou heardst me"; "Thou knowest": While in the throes of a difficult time one may look back trustingly or ruefully at the moment of decision--whether the exchange of marital vows, the ordination candidate's folded hands inside those of his ordaining prelate, or whatever may apply.  Hopkins reaffirms his conversion, calling upon God to witness to the truth of his offering.

There seems to be a tension between the forcefulness of God's action within Hopkins and the freedom in which Hopkins assented to that action.  As ever, the Catholic "both/and" stance is the way to go.  At no point would one imagine Hopkins (or any convert/"revert") claiming to be forced into it.  The impulse to respond in concert with the Holy Spirit is strong, yet never assertive beyond one's ability to refuse.  "You duped me, O Lord, and I let myself be duped" (Jer 20:7).

Stanza three:

The frown of his face
Before me, the hurtle of hell
Behind, where, where was a, where was a place?
I whirled out wings that spell	20
And fled with a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host.
My heart, but you were dovewinged, I can tell,
Carrier-witted, I am bold to boast,
To flash from the flame to the flame then, tower from the grace to the grace.

I can imagine this act of faith taking place during nocturnal Eucharistic Adoration ("altar and hour and night," st. 2), where the worshipper is drawn, moth-like, toward the "Living Flame of Love" of which St. John of the Cross sang.

Hopkins stammers to acknowledge his "Catch-22" situation, in which neither fight nor flight suffice.
"I whirled out wings that spell": read during that spell (the fretful time in which he considers himself trapped by "the frown of his [God's] face before" and "the hurtle of hell behind" him).  Like his mentor John Henry Newman, he is not simply fleeing from Anglicanism, but flying to Catholicism.

He describes his surrender as "a fling of the heart to the heart of the Host."  This description of his conversion is not as dramatic as stanza 2 with its talk of a "midriff astrain."  With the swift determination of a carrier pigeon or a dove, he instinctively pursued his Pursuer.

"From the flame to the flame": I do not know if there is any literary dependence or homage in this observation, but fellow Anglican Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) seemed to draw upon several of Hopkins' images in the fourth section of "Little Gidding" (1942), the last of Eliot's Four Quartets:

The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre —
To be redeemed from fire by fire.

Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.

"Pyre or pyre"--As for Hopkins, so for Eliot and for all of us: what choice does there seem to be?  A monumental one.  The fire of heaven or the fire of hell; and if heaven, even the way-station Purgatory is traditionally described as flagrant.  This befits the human heart, made for experiencing depth and intensity.

So if we are looking to escape the fire of purification and transformation, there is no "place" ahead or behind for us to go.  There is only inward.  Perhaps we can think of divine love as an inevitable, "intolerable shirt of flame" that we wear on the inside, that we can comfortably remove no more than our own skin.  Our heart, also on the inside, knows where to go: to the heart of the Host (the hostia is the "victim," the Whole-Burnt Offering for our salvation).

God Is Still Speaking

I took this picture in our Daily Mass Chapel, where the Blessed Sacrament is exposed most Thursdays from after the 7:30am Mass to 10pm.

(And in case you were interested, our annual Forty Hours Devotions are taking place Sunday, 31 Sept through Tuesday, 2 Oct.)

By the look of the microphone position, you might think that Jesus has the mike. The United Church of Christ likes to say, "God is still speaking; listen". For Catholics, His preeminent mode of Self-Disclosure is the Liturgy of which the Eucharist is the principal fruit.