Eucharistic worship of the beloved Son.
The priest also invites us to mark our bodies with the cross, to name ourselves as creatures baptized into the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Despite the plurality of individuals gathered in our parish, we share in common before all else the sign of the cross, which has made us brothers and sisters of the Word made flesh and therefore of one another.
Thus, The Entrance Rite invites every one of us gathered in that assembly to make a space for the divine presence to enter into our hearts. God is already at work in our lives, wooing us in the first place to join our voices with God’s holy ones at Mass that day. God is at work in gathering together an assembly of priests, prophets, and kings. Yet the triune God still wants us to create even more space, to make room for God to enter into our individual lives as we pray together the Church’s Eucharistic liturgy.
At every Mass, as we assemble together, God invites us to:
Lift up the gates of your homes so that I may come dwell among you there.
Lift up the gates of your hands that through them I may reach out in mercy to the ends of the earth.
Lift up the gates of your lips that you may speak my loving name to all the nations.
Lift up the gates of your eyes so that you may learn to see my presence dwelling among you.
Lift up the gates of your ears so that you may hear my saving Word this day.
Lift up the gates of your mouth so that you may taste the sweetness of the Lord.
Questions and Practices
1. Why do you decide to go to Mass weekly?
2. The Church is defined first and foremost by its gathering to celebrate the Eucharist. How might this change the way that you understand participation in the Eucharist?
3. What things might you do over the course of the week to prepare to welcome God’s presence in the Mass?
Chapter Three
The Chant
“Sing to the LORD a New Song”
(Ps 96:1)
Among my undergraduates, music functions as a soundtrack to their lives. As they walk across campus, earbuds connected to their iPhones, their pilgrimage to class is punctuated by ear candy intended to either soothe the soul or excite the affections for another day. Whether students (or some of their faculty) are secretly dancing to the music of Taylor Swift or grounded in Mozart’s Jupiter, they’re understanding their world differently through the power of song.
I came to recognize the interconnection between music and movement while living in Boston during my doctoral studies. On my lengthy walk to class I listened nearly every day to the symphonies of Mozart. Through the power of Mozart’s artistry, the world around me began to open up. I noticed the stunning greenness of the trees, together with the shape of each individual leaf. I attended to the architectural fittingness of the homes that I passed by as I traversed the sidewalks of Newton. The external world, once mere background noise to my inner musings, became a gift through the power of a song that pulled me outside of myself toward the harmony of the universe.
The Church has recognized the power of music to give this kind of shape to our perception of God’s activity in the world. As we enter into the Mass, as the Church ascends upon her pilgrimage toward the heavenly liturgy of love that is God’s very life, we sing. In fact, the Church has found this singing so important that we have been given both words and a tune to sing as we enter into the celebration of the Mass. The introit (or entrance chant) focuses our attention at the very beginning of Mass upon the mystery that we celebrate during this liturgical season. On the Second Sunday of Advent, we cry out:
O people of Sion, behold,
the Lord will come to save the nations,
and the Lord will make the glory of his voice heard
in the joy of your heart. (Cf. Is 30:19, 30)
Here, we recall Israel’s longing that God might act definitively in history. We Christians are to take up this very same posture during the season of Advent, longing for the second coming of our Lord. Already, Jesus comes again into our midst through the joy of singing this song, as the hearts of every believer stretch forth yearning for God’s presence among us. This song of longing for God’s presence, while especially appropriate during Advent, is meant to inform our desires every time we go to Mass.
The preference for a set chant at the beginning of the Mass is more than a holdover from an “old-fashioned” Catholicism. These introit chants are always taken from the Scriptures. The entrance chant focuses our attention upon the history of presence that God has with the human race. When on the Friday after Ash Wednesday, we cry out,
The Lord heard and had mercy on me;
the Lord became my helper (Ps 30[29]:11),
we join our voices with all of Israel, with the entire history of saints and sinners who have benefited from the merciful love of God. God has forgiven the human family before. God has forgiven me before. And at every Mass, God’s heart of mercy comes forth to greet his prodigal children.
Of course, few of us hear these entrance chants on a regular basis. Most of our parishes substitute a hymn, one that should have the very same theme as the introit for the day. The problem with many of these published hymns is that they focus too much upon the gathering of the assembly. We end up a singing a rally song about ourselves, about how excellent we are as the Church.
The entrance song or chant should focus less upon ourselves and more on how the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit has redeemed the human race, gathering us together now to sing a new song to the Lord: “Sing to the LORD a new song; / sing to the Lord, all the earth. / Sing to the LORD, bless his name” (Ps 96:1–2). We gather together to praise the God who is active within human history, not to feel pepped up or to remind God that he has chosen a remarkable people.
Sing a New Song
Still, singing is not simply a matter of vocal performance or entertainment for the Christian. Instead, as St. Augustine notes, to sing this new song to the Lord is to commit ourselves to the unity of all humanity that the Church promises. We come into Church with many songs ringing in our ears. We hear the song of war that tells us that the only way toward peace is through the sword. We hear the music of efficiency that reduces women and men to their jobs and income brackets. The orchestra of advertising plays its symphony in which women and men are merely consumers in a world in which happiness can be achieved through acquisition alone.
In the midst of these unsatisfying songs, we sing a hymn of joy that once again reminds us of our identity as creatures made for praise. We are not first and foremost warriors, workers, or consumers, but women and men created in the image and likeness of God. To sing at the very beginning of Mass is to dispose ourselves toward the worship that we are to offer during the rest of the liturgy. It is to commit ourselves to a form of life in which everything we are, everything that we give, is praise:
You must praise him with the whole of yourselves. Not only must your tongue
