Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence
Take a look around. What do you see? Four walls, windows, chairs with people sitting on them. And in front of you an altar with candles and candlesticks, a missal, a chalice covered in white. Let me ask the question a different way. What do you not see? And let me answer the question for you. You do not see God. This is supposed to be the House of God, so where is he? Of course, we know that God is everywhere, present yet invisible. He is pure spirit and therefore unable to be detected by our five senses. We know he is present here by our faith, but in this case our faith is a blind faith, unable to see that divine Being whom we worship. The point is, what’s so special about this place that you come here every Sunday to worship God, if he’s equally present in your living room or your back patio?
Our inability to perceive the presence of God is likely to put a bit of a strain on our faith. But after years of being told that God is omnipresent, we have assumed a position whereby we simply accept that it is true. We cease to question God’s presence among us because to do so is to question the very essence of our faith. And without that faith, our hope of eternal life would also disappear out the window. In our ensuing despair we would then be dragged down into a life without love. We would love neither God, for we would have ceased to believe in him, nor our neighbor as ourselves because they would cease to be as important to us as we ourselves. We would end up being our own God. Many in this world already think this way, which is why the world is what it is. We who despise the world cannot abide the thought of losing our happy peace of mind and hope for eternal life. And so we choose to believe…
This is a very selfish reason for believing in God, and I hope we will avoid the trap. Certainly, it may form a part of our motivation for believing, but it should not be the first and foremost reason. We should love God for his own sake, not with the hope of gaining ought nor seeking a reward, but solely because our Lord and God is our Lord and God.
During this celebration of the octave of Corpus Christi, the Church turns our attention to the Holy Eucharist. Like the sun in the sky around which the other planets revolve, the Eucharist is the shining star among the other sacraments. There are many reasons why our blessed Lord chose to provide us with his Real Presence of his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity in this sacrament. One of those reasons is to counteract that tendency we’ve been talking about to lose faith in an omnipresent yet invisible God. This little chapel is indeed the House of God, because during our Mass today, at the words of consecration, our Lord Jesus Christ will become physically present among us. God is everywhere yes, but at those most sacred words, he is present among us in the same sense as when he walked the earth with his twelve apostles. What a truly awesome and amazing thing we have the privilege of witnessing today in this humble chapel!
What should be our reaction to our Lord’s presence among us? Surely, one of infinite respect. We should fix our full attention upon him, conscious of the enormity of what is taking place before us. We should happily kneel before him and come before his presence with adoration and thanksgiving. “Let all mortal flesh keep silence,” says the hymn, “and with fear and trembling stand; ponder nothing earthly-minded, for with blessing in his hand Christ, our God, to earth descending, comes our homage to command.”
Alas, so often, our gaze wanders away from our God, present on the altar under the form of bread and wine. Our thoughts drift away into visions and fantasies, our own private world with its hopes, fears, loves and resentments. We are so immersed in ourselves that when we find ourselves before our Creator, we cannot focus for more than a few seconds upon his presence, preferring our own emotional, material, and selfish vanities. What a lost opportunity we have each Sunday to worship face to face the Divine Being who made us, who died for us, and who one day shall judge us. Our prayers of adoration, confession, thanksgiving and supplication so easily yield to the most mundane daydreams of our imperfect soul.
Let’s remember, we are at Mass. The Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. We are at the foot of the Cross of Calvary, witnessing the continued sacrifice of the Son of God in propitiation for our sins. This is not a TV show. We are not meant to just sit and watch, this church is not a theater, and we are not here to be entertained. We are here because God is here. God is everywhere and we can therefore be anywhere and God would be there. But he is here in a very special way, in his Real Presence in the Holy Eucharist, and that is why we are not just anywhere on Sunday morning. We are here because it is here that we may find that presence of God, and fall on our knees and worship him face to face.
Our participation in the Mass should not be passive but physical and external. Our bodily posture should reflect the relative solemnity of the various parts of the Mass, as we kneel, stand or sit. We should genuflect during the Creed and the Last Gospel, bow at the appropriate places listed in the Missal, make the sign of the Cross when prescribed, for example at the absolution in the Confiteor, at the end of the Gloria and Creed, strike our breast three times at the mea culpas, at the Agnus Dei, at the Domine non sum dignus. There’s plenty to keep us busy, and it’s for a reason. It’s to remind us that we are participants in this act of sacrifice which is the Mass, our external observations help us to remember what we should be doing internally through our various prayers.
But above all and if nothing else, when God is present, we must adore him. For his presence is a Real Presence and we should imitate the angels who stand forever before him in heaven: “At his feet the six-winged seraph, cherubim with sleepless eye, veil their faces to the presence as with ceaseless voice they cry: ‘Alleluia, alleluia! Alleluia, Lord Most High!’”