Our People

Staying in: the Mass

Retreat to Clergy of the Military Ordinariate, Sixth Conference

By Most Rev. Anthony Fisher OP
Auxiliary Bishop of Sydney
30/11/2005

C S Lewis, the great Anglican theologian, basing himself soundly on Scripture, said, “In Heaven, everything is either silence or music.” As Christians we are first of all servants of the Word Incarnate, that Word who dwelt voiceless in His mother’s womb for nine months, who lived in Nazareth in obscurity for most of His life, and whose redemptive work was accomplished in the emptiness of the Cross and the silence of the tomb. Much of what he did, he did in silence. And when He spoke the world was often silent before Him: in His disputes with the Pharisees, in His teaching of the Apostles, in His answers to His accusers at the Passion. These quiet aspects of God Incarnate, dwelling among us, continue to suffuse the Most Holy Eucharist, the primary place of our encounter with God in this world, where the Word is silent.

Today silence is difficult to attain. We are surrounded by noise, much of it horrible, brutish noise. There is traffic or the incessant bang-bang-bang of Progress installing a new building or road. Even by ourselves we are never far from the car radio, CD player or i-Pod to shield us from the uncomfortable encounter with silence. Combined with artificial lighting, noise makes modern life one big sensory overload.

Yet we do still understand something of that quiet gazing in wonderment and adoration from ordinary life: the way the Lover gazes upon the Beloved; or a devoted hound its master; the mother her new-borne child; the gardener his finest blooms; the appreciative viewer an artistic masterpiece; the student-disciple a favourite teacher. All these in different ways lead us to some understanding of what that silent attention we call adoration might mean for the creature who gazes upon its Creator.

God gives us His saints as an example of this attentive gaze. They show us what it is like. There is another story from the Desert Fathers: “Three Fathers used to go and visit Blessed Anthony every year and two of them used to discuss their thoughts and the salvation of their souls with him, but the third always remained silent and did not ask him anything. After a long time Abba Anthony said to him, “You often come here to see me, but you never ask me anything,” and he replied, “It is enough for me to see you, Father.”

There is a quality about the soul close to God that is readily discernible and attractive to people. Not just the saints, but each of us is summoned by God to that mystery of stillness which is the Holy Eucharist. Have you ever noticed how some of the mysteries of the Rosary contain more quiet and privacy, than busyness and publicity? The Annunciation, Visitation and Nativity were all rather private affairs, with only two or three people present; there were a similar number at the Transfiguration and only a few more at the Institution of the Eucharist; of those attending the Agony in the Garden only one was awake; and no-one witnessed the Resurrection. These are not about public events so much as the other mysteries are. They are concerned with God’s encounter with the World in the person of Jesus Christ and the World’s return of the Divine Gaze.

Our model for meeting Christ in the Eucharist is Mary the Mother of God, the Theotokos. In Western iconography she is commonly portrayed as a beautiful woman with a big, fat Italian baby. But in Eastern iconography we can see her still pregnant with the unborn baby Jesus visible through her glass belly. The child already blesses us from the womb. Mary is like a monstrance bearing the Blessed Sacrament for all to see. At the Visitation she carries Him as if in a Eucharistic procession to Elizabeth and her unborn baby John, who must in due course proclaim Him to the world.  Elizabeth, Luke reports, felt the child leap in her womb.  According to one tradition he was doing somersaults, dancing for joy that Mary and Jesus had come.  In another tradition he leapt into kneeling position, his hands together in prayer, though still a foetus. Neither would have been very comfortable for Elizabeth! But either way the response is to Mary the walking monstrance and the Divine One she bears within her. And she unveils Him, delivers Him from the tabernacle of her body, at the Nativity. Her first meeting with Christ, however, takes place at the Annunciation, when the Word that she conceived in her mind at Gabriel’s greeting now becomes Incarnate in her womb. God became Man within her, through her “Yes” to God.

This word we translate as ‘Yes’ is in the original Greek text, genoito. It implies two important things for us. First of all the mood of this verb is optative. It expresses a desire: Mary is not just saying “OK, if you must”. Rather, she is saying “Yes, that’s what I want! O that it might happen! Let it be! Yes!” It is not a grudging acceptance of God’s demands, but an ecstatic and wholehearted acceptance, a generous gift of self in one word. The word genoito is also in the middle voice, a construction that we find hard to express in English. North American English catches the voice in phrases like “Don’t beat up on yourself”. It suggests an identity between the subject and object of the verb. The activity of God in the life of Mary was also Mary’s activity. She was both an active subject and a willing recipient of God’s work. She spoke the Word and He spoke her.

A friend of mine and brother in the Dominican Order, Fr Vincent Nguyen Tien Hai was ordained a priest in 1975 at the end of Vietnam War and the beginning of the terrible communist reign over all that land. He was appointed to one of poorest parishes in Saigon and shared in the people’s hardships. He worked by day as a tricycle pusher and by night as a teacher. He was forbidden to practice his priesthood and simply for being a priest he was eventually imprisoned. He spent some time in solitary confinement where his hair went grey. While there he longed for the Eucharist: to receive it as a Christian and to celebrate it as a priest.

Vincent eventually escaped and acme to Australia and joined our province of Dominicans. He told us once of a Mass he did get to celebrate in that concentration camp once he was released from solitary and returned to the barracks. A tiny piece of bread had been smuggled into the camp, with a medicine capsule of wine inside it. One night after preparing the others in his barracks, he lay in the dark on his bunk and whispered the prayers of the Mass. His chest was the altar. Though they risked their lives by doing so, those in the bunks nearby whispered their responses and received a crumb of Christ’s Body.

There was almost nothing to be seen in that Mass. Almost nothing to be heard. Yet those present were probably more completely engaged than in any Mass you and I have ever attended. Our new Pope Benedict XVI has spoken often of the Marian dimension of the Eucharist. Some people think the Second Vatican Council said that as many people as possible should be busy doing something for as much of the time as possible during Mass. But as our new Pope explains, when the Council called for participatio actuosa—actual participation—by everyone in the Mass it did not mean this. There is no need to be doing something all the time, least of all for that one hour a day or a week we give back to God. There is another way of actual participation and that is in contemplation. But contemplation is not “veging out”, anaesthesia, going to sleep. It engages all the senses, the passions, the mind and the heart, pondering God’s words and actions, as Mary so often did. We can sit quietly with God’s words and actions in the Liturgy, letting them wash over us like waves, letting them seep into our pores, letting ourselves be immersed in them like fish becoming part of the sea.

Actual participation in the Eucharist, then, is first and foremost contemplative. It remembers and it ponders. It remembers and it ponders the breaking of Christ’s Body and spilling of His Blood on the Cross, that moment of our salvation which He mimed and explained at the Last Supper and extended throughout time through His Church’s celebration. On the Cross and in the Eucharist we encounter a man and a God whose love for us is so total that He would give us absolutely everything He is: His body and blood, His humanity and divinity, his life and death and rebirth. We contemplate that saving Mystery in Eucharistic Adoration outside the Sacred Liturgy and also in our encounter with Christ in the Mass, our encounter with the action of Christ the High Priest offering himself on the altar. That Mystery involves all our men and women. It is not just for those who perform some doing-office like priests, deacons and acolytes. In this secret heart of the Church, we may all return the loving gaze of God, as much the one kneeling at the back, as the one standing up the front. There at the Eucharist we hear the silence of eternity. Be quiet now, He says, just for a little while be still.  Stay with me.  Keep watch with me.  Watch and pray.  In silence.

One of the greatest Catholic philosophers of recent times, the late Elizabeth Anscombe, told the story of a child—perhaps one of her own—who at two-and-a-half years old was only then beginning to talk. He had been introduced to the mystery of the Eucharist in simple language by his parents at Mass. The woman was coming back from Communion when she met by her son in the free space at the back of the church.
‘Is he in you?’ the boy asked.

‘Yes,’ she replied. And to her amazement the boy immediately prostrated himself in front of her.
What this infant had grasped, with childish innocence, was one of the Church’s central proclamations: this really is Christ’s Body and Blood we share in today. Christ really is present here in a way, with an intensity, with a presence that he is nowhere else. When the minister of communion offers the host and says ‘The body of Christ’ he or she does not mean: ‘This holy bread is a symbol which reminds us of the body of Christ’, or here’s a nice poetic metaphor for you, a friendly reminder call. No, the Church says with an audacity only a direction from Jesus himself could justify: this really is Jesus Christ whole and entire. The story, which every generation of Christians from the Apostles through to own has never tired to retelling is this: that on the night he was betrayed, Jesus took bread and wine and offered his own Body and Blood, his very self, to us under signs of bread and wine. He gave himself to us and continues to do so in his Eucharist in a way which no mere metaphor, symbol, holy bread, could ever do. And the best we can do in the face of such an astonishing mystery is to fall down like that child in silent adoration.

In silence. But also in song. Human language is designed first and foremost for the praise of God, for hymnody. It is “doxological”, made for worship not for strife. God the Father eternally speaks forth God the Son, the Word. That Word became flesh so that flesh might hear and speak to God. It was said of Saint Dominic that he always spoke either to God or about God. He had many words to say, but none was wasted.

In a recent article writer Paul Johnson reminisced about his days at a Jesuit school in England when, as a cadet, he wore puttees and a peaked cap, brass buttons and shining boots. On the Feast of Corpus Christi the boys provided a Sovereign’s Guard of Honour at High Mass, not to glorify military service or earthly sovereignty, but to mark the Real Presence of the King of kings in their chapel and, indeed, his power to turn swords into ploughs, rifles into ex votos. The boys lined the aisle with rifles and fixed bayonets and, as moment of consecration approached, marched up in front of the High Altar and greeted the Host held on high with the Present Arms. In the evening, at Solemn Benediction, in the pitch dark chapel, two thousand candles were arranged on the altar, all unlit but linked by a thin thread of gun-cotton. At a signal from the Master of Ceremonies the outermost candle on each side was lit and the flames leapt from one to another until the entire vast altar was, literally, incandescent.

Sadly, as you know all too well, rifles and bayonets or their more contemporary equivalents, are not always used to such ends: life and death, violence and peace, God and man, central themes of our Mass are perhaps more poignant for you who serve our armed servicemen and women than for many other priests and deacons. Will we ever turn our rifles and bayonets to the honour of God rather than the death of our fellows, as Isaiah prophesied earlier this week? Dare we hope for a civilisation of life and love? Dare we not hope?

Isaiah the prophet dared spoke his word of hope to us. Much of his prophecy is in verse, probably intended to be sung. Words are especially moving in song. I think that is how we can best understand the institution and authority of the Church. The Petrine aspect of the Church—popes, bishops, priests, deacons, other office-holders, sacraments, creeds, definitions and rubrics—complements the Marian aspect. Mary the contemplative, ‘pondering all these things in her heart’ sings her Magnificat.  We want to join in.  But every song has a melody. It has to be sung this way, not that way, in tune not out of tune. Song means harmony and beauty, not disharmony and discord.
Christ Himself institutes that principle of order for His Church, not as an optional extra, but as part of the song itself. From the very beginning of the Church the Holy Eucharist was celebrated under authority. It was never a ‘make it up as you go’ affair, a liturgical ‘do your own thing’. The oldest Christian text outside the New Testament, the Didache, calls the Mass the “cosmic mystery” that defines the very nature of the Church. To lead the community at the Eucharist you had to be an appointed elder and the appointed elders had to do This in memory of Christ, not do just whatever they pleased. St Paul rebuked the Corinthians because they profaned the Eucharist. A few decades later Pope St Clement wrote to those same troublesome Corinthians because the Parish Council was fighting with the clergy over the Liturgy. Around the same time St Ignatius of Antioch told his flock to reverence the clergy who lead us in the Mass, and to have nothing to do with those who set up their own show and break with the unity of the Church.

How easy it is to think: “My way is the best way! What do these people know? I’ll sing my own tune. My music is better anyway.” Like pop groups that break up because everyone thinks their idea is best, so the Church can be torn into factions and schisms and breakaways. It kills the music; we are no longer on the same page; we no longer sing the same songs; indeed we stop singing altogether. Instead of “Behold the Lamb of God” it becomes “Look at me, look at me”. The terrible history of self-promotion, division, betrayal and lies that began at the Last Supper continues.

Some years ago I remember a discussion with a great Dominican theologian of the Eucharist, Fr Herbert McCabe, about whether it would be appropriate in a youth Mass to use potato chips and coke instead of bread and wine, or whether the Church’s rules about bread and wine should be followed. He said he thought we should follow the rubrics here, and not just because it is for the Church to tell us what to use for the sacraments. He thought there was an added reason not to use chips and coke: not because they were not wheaten bread and grape wine (as the Church requires), but because chips and coke are not food and drink!

Jesus chose simple, staple food and drink, bread and wine, to recall us to His own passion and to promise us a new future. He took those gifts from our everyday world, here and now, so as to make a place for His sacramental presence to us in the here and now. But bread and wine are not neutral symbols for us. They bear all the ambiguity of human fabrication, with its mixture of blessing and curse. Bread, the simple food of peasants and kings, the food before all other foods, made from that abundance of wheat which grows all over our globe. Yet we know there are so many without bread, so many who will starve this very day. We know that there are trade wars, tariffs and cartels, and that huge stockpiles of wheat are sown back into ground or dumped at sea, rather than given to starving. Then there is the wine, that drink which cheers our hearts, which brings to mind parties and toasts, celebrations and good times. Yet we know alcohol is the source of so much pain and suffering in drunkenness and violence, in destitution and deaths on the roads, in broken homes and bones and lives.

Into all this mess of human joys and hopes, pains and fears, to this gang of confused and betraying disciples at the Last Supper, into all the disharmony and discord of human noise, into all the causes for low morale amongst some of our clergy today, Jesus comes to us, again and again in the Eucharist. It is under these very ambiguous signs of bread and wine that He makes himself present, making sense of it all, humanising it, divinizing it: so that nothing human is alien to Him, nothing human is alien to God. As from all eternity, now from the very middle of the human mess, God the Father sings His great love song that is God the Son. And  that Son now charges us: “from now on, do this in memory of Me.” If the Church is to keep doing this, if Christ’s saving death and resurrection are forever to be sacramentalized in His Body and Blood, and then brought to his people, then the Church needs you chaplains. The Church needs you to carry on the love song that God sang to His Church at the Last Supper. The Church needs you to keep feeding our servicemen and women’s bodies and souls. And if the Church needs you, you too need the Church. You need to hear that song. You need to receive that Presence into your own, that Substance into your own, that Body into your own.

That same Christ Jesus had close to Him to the end Mary His mother, now also Mother of the Church, pondering all these things in her heart; and Peter the Denier, the Fisher of men, now Shepherd of the flock and Rock of the Church. But He also kept one other close by and he was a young person like many of those in your flocks, perhaps a mere teenager. His name was John, ‘the beloved disciple’. His head lay on the breast of the Lord in the Upper Room at the Last Supper. He stayed by his Lord on Golgotha to see that same beloved breast pierced by the soldier’s lance. Perhaps the prophecy of Simeon to Mary, that “a sword shall pierce your heart also” applied to him as well, especially when he stood with Mary at the foot of the cross and saw Christ’s body broken and blood spilt.

John was prepared to make a place for Mary, to be her disciple in acceptance and contemplation. And he was prepared to live in Peter’s house, the Church. John ran to the empty tomb at the startling news that Jesus had risen. He got there first because he was young and Peter as old as a bishop! But he waited for Peter to enter the tomb first. Love deferred to Authority, Silence to the Music. It was Love that recognized the Risen One by the Sea of Galilee. “It is the Lord!” John said. If we are to understand Christ and the Church and the mystery of the Eucharist, then we must Love! If we want God to fulfil His promise that the Mass is merely the foretaste, the appetizer, for the heavenly banquet to come, then we must Love! Love with all our heart and soul! Love with silence and with song! Love until it hurts! If we would run to the empty tomb with Peter, then we must stand silent by the cross with Mary. If we would sing the Magnificat with Mary, then we must let Peter conduct the music. But above all, we must love like the young man John! We must lean our head upon the breast of your Lord in the Last Supper that is every Mass!