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The Most Holy Sacrifice
of the Mass
A Primer
for Clueless
Catholics
Part 3
“I
Don’t Think We’re in Kansas Anymore, Toto”
So,
we have discovered that
He is
there!
From the beginning
of time men and women have sought God. Today
we seek Him still ... and we have found Him.
You have entered the Church and are about to
pass beyond, as it were, the gates that lead
to the vestibule of Heaven ... which is timeless.
Beyond those doors
you will encounter, as much as is possible in
this life, something very like Heaven where
the past, the future, and the eternal are present.
History, understood as something past – as events
that once occurred but have receded into a frame
of time no longer available to us – is, or soon
will be, gathered up into the present and be
enacted once again before you. It is not that
the present time has left us, as that the present
has penetrated the past, and the past the present,
so that we can no longer speak of some things
that once occurred (although they did occur
at some definite point in history, in time),
but only of things occurring now, here, presently,
immediately before us. The past, in a very real
sense, becomes present to us – not as a memory,
but as a present reality.
Do you remember the sequence in the Wizard
of Oz in which Dorothy’s
house is swept up in a tornado, spun relentlessly
in the furious skies, and dropped suddenly,
not in Kansas from which it was uprooted, but
in the Land of Oz? Dorothy approaches the door
warily. Up to that point in the movie, all is
in black and white — and then ... as Dorothy
opens the door, beyond which lies the new world,
a effulgence of magnificent color is revealed
to her, pours in upon her. It is a world of
recognizable things, by and large, but they
are suddenly invested with unspeakable life
and color and beauty. Hidden from her eyes,
however, at least at first, are the people who
dwell there, the yet unseen.
This is a metaphor
for your standing before the doors that lead
into Church, into the place where the Most Holy
Sacrifice of the Mass will be enacted, celebrated.
You leave the whirlwind of the world behind
you, and all the gray and lifeless things that
accompany you every day of the week except this
day. Beyond the door is a new world, a world
of things unseen by the eyes — but a strange
inversion occurs. With eyes wide in astonishment,
Dorothy opened the door and entered a new world.
With us, that new
world of unspeakable life and beauty will be
revealed to us ... when we close our
eyes.
As the eyes
of the body close, the eyes of faith open.
And what they will see, discover to us, reveal,
will touch the fiber of our being ... and more
than touch it, transform it!
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Totally
Faithful to the Sacred
Deposit of Faith entrusted to
the Holy See in Rome
“Scio
opera tua ... quia modicum habes
virtutem, et servasti verbum Meum,
nec non negasti Nomen Meum”
“I
know your works ... that you have
but little power, and yet you have
kept My word, and have not denied
My Name.”
(Apocalypse 3.8)
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