Grace on tap … three words for a profane image of a Sacred reality.
May I be forgiven for profaning the Mystery, if I indeed I do, by reporting how these three bizarre words first came to my mind. I report them because this profane formula had a peculiar value in helping me to see what was really going on in the heart of the Church.
They came to me years ago as I journeyed into Catholicism. As I realised why the ‘source and summit’ of the Catholic faith was not a set of beliefs to be heard in a Sunday sermon. But an experience of Grace.
As I realised why until the 1960’s, the Catholic Mass was celebrated in an incomprehensible language (Latin). And why the language of the Grace of the Sacrament was even more important, than the language of the belief. And why up to 400,000 priests across the planet still celebrate the Mass every day, after two millennia, even if not another soul is present beside the priest to receive the Grace.
As I realised, then, that what lay at the heart of the Catholic, Orthodox and High Anglican Churches was an understanding that we could go to receive Grace, a guaranteed flow of enlivening, strengthening, cleansing Grace, if we could just turn on the tap, turn on the tap by sincerely opening ourselves to the Mystery at the heart of the Mass.
And I add in Orthodoxy and Catholicism, the Mystery at the heart of Confession, receiving absolution from Christ *via* the priest.
I go to these Sacraments, trying to be sincerely attentive, sincerely willing to say ‘Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa’, for the pain I inflict every day of life, ‘through what I have done, and what I have failed to do …’ And I receive, how deeply do I receive …
1 comment:
Thank you, head. I like your words, too.
The Sacraments sometimes seem to me like Catholicism's 'best keep secret'. Which is a tragedy.
At 33 years old I thought I was generally well educated, and indeed I probably knew more than the average person in Europe about religion.
But I hadn't got a clue what Catholicism was all about.
And from the Catholic perspective, what the whole purpose of the Church was ...
And how many others did I join with in sheer ignorance, until events in my 34th year changed everything?
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