Volume 26, Number 27

June 2, 2024 Matt Jacobson

Mrs. Grace Mudd and Dr. Mark Risinger were thurifers on Trinity Sunday and are seen here during the Solemn Te Deum. Father Sammy Wood was the preacher and his sermon can be viewed here. Click on any photo to enlarge.
Photo: MaryJane Boland

FROM FATHER SAMMY WOOD: ELEVATION

“The goal is elevation.”
~ U2, lyrics to Elevation

In a little booklet called “Pray the Mass,” published by our very own Saint Mary’s Press back in 1953, our former rector Father Grieg Taber calls the Mass the “very core and mainspring” of the catholic Christian’s life. The Catechism of the Catholic Church calls the Eucharist the “source and summit” of Christian life (CCC, ¶ 1324), and our Prayer Book calls it “the principal act of Christian worship” (BCP, p. 13). Maybe you’ve heard me crib T.S. Eliot and call the Mass the “still point of the turning world.” Whatever language we use, the Mass is the most important thing we do at Saint Mary’s because it is the most perfect act of worship of which we are capable. And that is precisely why we put everything we have into worshiping God with abandon and all the excellence we can muster.

In that vein, Father Taber continues:

The Mass is heavenward bound. So Mother Church catches her children up into color, ceremonial and music . . . She even helps her children to worship in the highest of spirits amid a blaze of lights and the glory of music and the majesty of the Liturgy which lifts her poor, half-hearted, weary and wandering children heavenward . . . We are not at Mass to express ourselves because it requires the poet, the musician, the artist, yes, the saint to do this for us. Wisely the Church uses in the Mass the best that can be produced by all of these combined. It is for us to say a grateful Amen.

At Mass we offer our very best; we summon all the reverence, gravity, solemnity, and devotion we can to satisfy the disciple’s passionate desire to worship. Thankfully, over the ages the Church has discerned various ways to assist us in our worship. From the Council of Trent:

Such is the nature of man, that, without external helps, he cannot easily be raised to the meditation of divine things; therefore has Holy Mother Church . . . employed ceremonies, such as mystic benedictions, lights, incense, vestments, and many other things of this kind, derived from an apostolical discipline and tradition, whereby both the majesty of so great a sacrifice might be recommended, and the minds of the faithful be excited, by those visible signs of religion and piety, to the contemplation of those most sublime things which are hidden in this sacrifice.

Mr. Clark Anderson and Mr. Zachary Roesemann brought forward the gifts of bread, wine, and water for the celebration of the Holy Eucharist.
Photo: MaryJane Boland

At Saint Mary’s, we are the beneficiaries of this great tradition of worshiping God in the beauty of holiness. And in the coming weeks and months, we’ll reach back into our heritage for more actions, sounds, and even different liturgical roles to enrich and enhance our worship.

You can expect the first such change this Sunday when we commemorate the Feast of Corpus Christi. This great solemnity celebrates the Real Presence of Jesus—his body, blood, soul, and divinity—in the Holy Eucharist. In the Middle Ages, a practice called “the elevations” developed for the laity to gaze in devotion upon the Sacrament they so seldom actually received. At the words of institution in the eucharistic prayer—“This is my body, This is my blood”—the priest held the elements aloft, often accompanied by the ringing of a bell as “an audible sign of our joyous praise and thanksgiving.” In time, these elevations came to symbolize Christ’s being “lifted up,” the means by which he draws all people to himself. (John 12.32) Starting Sunday, we will again decorate Jesus’ words of institution with elevations, genuflections, incense swings, and bells.

This is a change to our current practice, to be sure, so what does it signal? Over at the St. Bede Blog, friend of the parish Dr. Derek Olsen opines:

It’s easy for us to become numb to certain words and actions, and [Jesus’ words of institution] are no exception. We become used to hearing them and lose sense of how radical they are . . . In these words we hear [the new covenant] proclaimed week over week. And yet our struggle is to hear it again and again, to take its call to heart again and again, to step into the world that it offers us at our fingertips, closer to us even than our hands and our feet.

Derek isn’t fretting over when exactly the elements of bread and wine become Body and Blood—what he calls the “ping” moment. Indeed, he says “it doesn’t matter when it happens; it matters that it happens.” As my late friend Thomas Howard said, “the point is not that a magic spell has suddenly taken effect. Rather, we see the Church as Christ’s Body participating in his Priesthood, remembering, proclaiming, and presenting his ‘once-for-all’ Offering which is always present at the heavenly altar of which our earthly altars are the merest shadows . . . The liturgy is the enacting in time, here on earth, of the fixed, eternal reality of the Gospel,” and it is meet and right to accompany it with ceremonial and ritual to increase our devotion and lift us “poor, half-hearted, weary and wandering children” heavenward.

In making these changes to the liturgy, we are not taking to task the twentieth-century Liturgical Movement. Nor are we re-instituting a kind of Anglo-Catholic clericalism that says what happens “up there” at the altar at the hands of the priest is more important than what we all do “out there” in our pews. There’s plenty of scholarship that locates the “ping” moment in the entire prayer of the faithful at Mass. What Saint Mary’s will do in the coming months, however, is draw on the best of our own particular history of liturgical practice, reaching back for every treasure of our catholic heritage, to set apart the entire action of the Mass and lift our hearts heavenward.

The goal, as Bono sings, is elevation. — SW