WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
I doubt not then but innocence shall make false accusation blush, and tyranny tremble at patience.
What the world needs now... .
We all need
- to be loved and to give love.
- to belong and to be accepted.
- community, and to be at home.
- meaning, purpose, identity.
- truth, reality.
- hope, goodness.
- ritual, ceremony.
How Divine Worship, the Mass of the Ordinariate, provides authentic orientation to God while sustaining the disciple in truth, goodness and beauty.
- To be loved and to give love; the source of all true love is God. We are reminded in the Offertory of the Mass that Christ gave all to save us, to lift us up in love to the Father. When we offer our gift of self, our joys and sorrows, our gratitude for life's blessings from God, and for the times when we are handed challenges almost too great to bear, those gifts placed upon the altar - symbolized by the bread and wine - are received at the hands of the priest and offered to God Who, in return, transforms them into His very Body and Blood. God loves us. He comes to meet us in the Mass; He is ever-Present to us.
- To belong and to be accepted. Contrary to the reputation imposed by the ill-informed "gospel" of the legacy media, the Church is a welcoming home for everyone. Does that mean that all behaviours are acceptable among the People of God? No, of course not. We are called by the Divine Physician to abandon behaviours which ruin our physical and/or mental health and our spiritual wellbeing. God wants us to be with Him. Our eternal wellbeing depends on our hosting a humble heart informed by grace and our willing to embrace the path of life that God offers in Jesus Christ. Jesus identifies with all that we are; he loves us. However, he loves us too much to leave us stuck in sin. Will you respond to his invitation to newness of life? Divine Worship provides the disciple with opportunities to bring before the Lord his or her life, to ask for pardon and mercy, and to get oneself to the Sacrament of Penance. The Kyrie eleison - Lord have mercy - establishes us in humility. The Penitential Rite, which in Divine Worship occurs at the 'transept' of the Liturgy, before the Offertory, forms in us the intention to bend our hearts closer to the Lord. The Prayer of Humble Access places the words of the centurion upon our lips (St. Matthew 8:8) as we approach the summit of Holy Mass.
- Community: relationship. The congregation resides in the nave of the parish church. We are all on one level, the same level, united before the Lord. We are reminded that where two or three are gathered, there Jesus is in our midst (St. Matthew 18:20). We are united to the Lord in our undivided attention and common intention to entrust our lives, our sorrows and joys, to him. Our common identity is rooted in our orientation to the Lord. When the procession passes by us, we bow toward the crucifix, a visible symbol of Christ’s sacrifice. When we hear the Name of Jesus, we offer a bow of the head to acknowledge His Lordship, and the price He paid for our salvation. We are the people of God, saved by Jesus Christ to witness to His love and mercy.
- Meaning, purpose, identity: children of God our loving Father. For the Catholic there is no doubt that God loves us. He created us in His own image. CCC 1711 Endowed with a spiritual soul, with intellect and with free will, the human person is from his very conception ordered to God and destined for eternal beatitude. He pursues his perfection in "seeking and loving what is true and good" (GS 15 § 2).
- Truth: encountering God through Holy Scripture; Reality: oriented to the truth. The Liturgy of the Word is the arena in which we feast upon the wisdom of God. This diet of truth - the Truth - provides the sustenance, the manna from heaven, which sustains the disciple in the desert of this world. God is present in and through His word. The Holy Gospel, toward which we face in the Mass of the Ordinariate, is proclaimed in the nave of the church. Christ comes to meet us; we turn toward Him. Oriented to the One Who is the way, the truth and the life (St. John 14:6), the Gospel procession calls us to accompany Jesus to the holy of holies to receive his life, his Body and Blood. We seek to dwell with him in this life and the next. And we humbly beseech thee, O heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in; through Jesus Christ our Lord, to whom, with thee and the Holy Spirit, be all honour and glory, world without end. Amen.
- Hope; the imagination and realizing our potential; goodness: hospitality, selfless giving. The Holy Eucharist is the Gift Supreme. Once again, every Mass, our Lord delivers Himself to us in a most vulnerable state. Casualness, and - worse still - indifference on our part toward the reception of Him Who is our salvation, is a disturbingly irreverent approach to Holy Communion.
- Ritual, ceremony: encountering the sacred. The structure of Divine Worship provides for us a scaffolding whereby we are grafted into the one sacrificial offering of God to Himself. Every people of every culture and age has set themselves in ritual in an attempt to achieve harmony with the object of their deepest needs. For the Christian, it is God Himself Who has revealed the way in which He desires to be worshipped. Ritual gestures are ways of speaking or articulating the unspeakable mysteries we encounter in the Mass. The Sign of the Cross, for example, expresses our immersion in the inexhaustible reality of the mystery of the Cross and salvation in Christ. The physical gestures we encounter in the Mass allow us to express our gratitude - hope, joy, love, trust - in Jesus and in each other, united in the peace of Christ. Families have their rituals. Life is filled with rituals - graduation, coming of age ceremonies, birthday parties, etc. - that mark milestones that serve to render our memories of such events in a library or diary that can remind us of who we are, or who we once were, and who we might become. That library of experiences reminds us that when we depart from truth and goodness, we might very well be lost, and in need of the Mass to re-anchor us to the person God has called into being and His will for us. The rituals of Divine Worship have been established by Jesus Christ and breathed into form by the Holy Ghost down through the ages to make Christ Present to us. The rituals are not haphazard nor arbitrary, nor should they be dispensed with easily. The rituals of the Mass are love in action. The rituals into which we are embedded are not cheap inventions that attach themselves like barnacles on the hull of the Mass. The art of the Mass is just that - art. Anything less than art has no place in the sacred Liturgy.
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James 1:17
Every good endowment and every perfect gift is from above, coming down from the Father of lights with whom there is no variation or shadow due to change.
POPE LEO XIV Magnifica Humanitas
Even in the darkest nights, the Lord raises up men and women who refuse to give up, who persevere in doing good, who protect the vulnerable and open pathways to reconciliation. The memory of the saints, righteous people and the oft-forgotten peacemakers, show us that grace does not magically eliminate conflict, but instead it inspires active resistance to evil and an astonishing creativity in doing good” (paragraph 211).
THOMAS SOWELL
It is bad enough that so many people believe things without any evidence. What is worse is that some people have no conception of evidence and regard facts as just someone else's opinion.
WORDS TO THE WHYS
A man of righteousness rendereth his aid most freely unto the poor; yet a deceiver doth devour the innocent.
LEONARD VAN ROET
Wherefore doth a man endure false witness, whilst his accuser escapeth all chastisement?
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