life and your deeds. What I mean is this: now, while we are gathered in church, we praise God, but when each of you goes off home it looks as though you cease to praise him. But let each one of you not cease to live a good life, and then he or she will be praising God all the time. You only stop praising God when you swerve from just conduct and what pleases him. If you never turn aside from what is right your tongue is silent, but your life is shouting, and God’s ears are attuned to your heart. Just as our ears are sensitive to our voices, so are God’s ears sensitive to our thoughts.2
It is not just the music of the Mass or the opening hymn or chant that is to be our soundtrack. Praise of God is to become a habit of our hearts. We are to look at our friendships, our family, our jobs—everything—as relationships in which we praise God. Participation in the Mass every week attunes us to a truth that we might have forgotten in the course of our daily lives: that we are called to become a hymn of praise to the world.
Let the praise of God be in my heart of hearts,
Let the memory of the Scriptures become my song,
And let a hymn of love attune me, gracious God, to the peace that you promise to all those who sing a new song to the Lord.
Alleluia, praise to you O triune God.
Questions and Practices
1. What chants or hymns does your parish sing? How do these hymns prepare you to offer praise to God at the beginning of Mass?
2. What distracts you from offering the Mass with full heart and voice? How might you heal yourself of these distractions?
3. In what areas of your life do you need to learn to sing a new song?
Chapter Four
Reverencing the Altar and Greeting the People
“That I May Come to the Altar of God”
(Ps 43:4)
If you’ve ever been to an art museum in Europe, you’re likely to encounter room after room of panels of the crucified Lord, of his Mother Mary looking with compassion upon the wounded body of her Son, of martyrs in various forms of disfigurement. Because our art museums have saved so many remnants of Catholic culture, we may forget while wandering through these museums that some of these painted panels were originally intended to adorn the altar. These pieces of art were important to the celebration of the Mass.
One of the most spectacular of these is the Isenheim altarpiece, painted by Matthias Grünewald. The Isenheim includes panels depicting Saints Anthony and Paul in the desert, the Annunciation of the Blessed Virgin, the Resurrection and, at the very center of the altarpiece when fully opened, the crucified body of our Lord, Jesus Christ. His arms are twisted upon the cross in a way that no human muscle could move. His body is marked by sores almost too hideous to look upon.
It is important for the viewer of this artwork to know that the Isenheim altarpiece found its home in a hospital where patients were suffering from a terminal plague whose symptoms included the very same sores that marked the body of Christ. When the crucifixion panel of the altar was opened, these patients gazed with wonder upon the Lord of all the earth suffering with them. As Mass was celebrated on the altar, they looked with love upon the suffering Christ, knowing that in the Eucharist they shared in Christ’s redemptive suffering upon the cross: “Christ’s eternal life, expressed historically in the Resurrection and liturgically in the Eucharist, provided these patients with a model destiny for their own mutilated beings.”3
The Altar as Pledge of Love
The Isenheim altarpiece helps us understand the strange act of adoration that takes place at the beginning of every Mass. The priest approaches the altar, bowing toward it, kissing it with reverent love, and incensing the cross and the altar together. The word altar should denote to us a place of sacrifice. And the fact that the cross and the altar are incensed together further underline the sacrificial event that takes place at every Mass.
Of course, the altar that is kissed is itself a strange kind of altar. There will be no sacrifice of animals upon the altar stone. Rather, in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, bread and wine will be brought forward. Prayers will be prayed. The memory of Christ’s passion and death will be recalled. But no blood (unless something seriously terrible happens) will be spilled upon the altar stone.
The sacrifice of the Mass is Christ’s very sacrifice of love. It is the sacrifice of love that is the very origin of the Church to begin with. As Pope Benedict XVI wrote:
The Church is able to celebrate and adore the mystery of Christ present in the Eucharist precisely because Christ first gave himself to her in the sacrifice of the Cross. The Church’s ability to “make” the Eucharist is completely rooted in Christ’s self-gift to her. Here we can see more clearly the meaning of Saint John’s words: ‘he first loved us’ (1 Jn 4:19). We, too, at every celebration of the Eucharist, confess the primacy of Christ’s gift. The causal influence of the Eucharist at the Church’s origins definitively discloses … the priority of the fact that it was Christ who loved us “first.” For all eternity he remains the one who loves us first.4
In this sense, our participation in the sacrifice of the Mass is a return gift of love offered to the God who made the first move of love toward us. The God who entered into relationship with us in creation, who called us into covenant in the Exodus, who invited us to love anew in the prophets, who in the fullness of time entered into human history in Jesus Christ: this God made the first move. He loved us first, and he loved us unto the end, dying upon the cross as a supreme act of love. And he still loves us, drawing us closer to his side.
So the priest kisses an altar. Not because Catholics are masochists, having a carnival in the midst of a suffering world. We kiss the altar because it stands among us as a sign of Christ’s total act of love. What can we do as human beings but respond with a kiss to such a gift? As the priest kisses the altar, each of us gathered in the sanctuary is to let our whole heart long for the God who first loved us.
Bringing the Wounds of the World to the Altar
Of course, there is still something very provocative about kissing an altar, that object in the ancient world that functioned as a place of violence and death. Too often American religion serves as a pleasant sedative that enables us to bypass the suffering of the world. Religion is meant to make us feel happy in a world that is sad. To escape the sorrows of the mundane world. You often hear this kind of sentiment in really terrible liturgical music that seems to say: sure, not everything is great, but don’t worry, Jesus will make it all better.
Such an approach to religious practice is simply not Catholic. When we go to Mass, we do not leave behind the joys or sorrows that mark us. The Body of Christ throughout the world suffers from the wounds of sin and death, some of which we have inflicted through our own callousness. Psalm 42 cries out to God, “My being thirsts for God, the living God. / When can I go and see the face of God? / My tears have been my food day and night, / as they ask daily, ‘Where is your God?’” (Ps 42:3–4).
In the midst of the illness of loved ones we may ask, “Where are you, O God.” As we long for a spouse, only to discover relationship after relationship ending, we may cry out, “O God, where are you?” As we suffer through conflict in our marriage, we may cry out, “God, please do something!” As Christians undergo persecution
