Text of talk given by Fr. Charles Higgins to Una Voce Boston Chapter, West Roxbury, 23 January 2000 A.D.:
My talk tonight is entitled "Holy Mass-: From the Annunciation to the Ascension". This is not a theme about the course of the liturgical year. It is a theme about how the whole life of Christ is made present in a mysterious way at each and every Mass, whether that Mass be according to the Traditional Latin Mass, the "Immemorial Mass" we are so committed to perpetuating, or according to the so-called "New Mass".
We associate the Mass naturally with Christ's Crucifixion. We know and confess by faith that the Mass is the True Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ made present on the altar by the words of consecration. The Mass is therefore a representation and a renewal of the one offering made by the Lord on Mt. Calvary. Let us hear again these familiar words from the Council of Trent:
"In this divine sacrifice the same Christ is present and immolated in a bloodless manner who once for all offered Himself in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross; . . . only the manner of offering is different" (Trent, sess. XXII, cap. 2).
The Mass is certainly Calvary. If we did not associate the separate consecrations of the bread and the wine with the sacrificial action of the Cross, then we would be deficient in our understanding of our Catholic religion. Indeed it is possible for us to assist at Mass while dwelling exclusively in our imaginations upon Calvary. There exist some very moving devotional helps (perhaps you are familiar with some of them) which connect each ceremony of the Mass with a moment in Christ's Sorrowful Passion.
But, that is not all there is to the mystery. The Mass does not extract this one aspect of Christ's Life from the rest of His Life. We may divide the Life of Our Lord into five distinct phases:
All of these 5 phases of Christ's Life are represented and renewed in the Mass. The Mass is Calvary, yes, but the Mass is also Bethlehem, it is also Nazareth, it is also Galilee, Bethany, Jerusalem.
Here is how Dom Gaspar Lefebvre describes it in his Preface to the old St. Andrew's Missal:
"The altar becomes each day before our eyes a corner of Palestine, where we celebrate with Jesus the events of His 1ife; His coming (Advent), His birth (Christmas), His preaching (Lent), His suffering and death (Passion), His Resurrection (Easter), His Ascension and the coming of the Holy Spirit (Pentecost) whereby we receive those special graces which Holy Communion infuses into our souls. Thus in the liturgy the whole Mystical Body of Christ lives again the life of the Master, in imitating His virtues and examples." (St. Andrew Missal, Preface, p. vii)
A beautiful thought: the altar is a corner of Palestine whereon we are celebrating the whole human-divine life of Jesus.
It is important to stress here too the simultaneous nature of this renewal and representation of the Christ Life at Mass. We don't only have Bethlehem at Christmastide, we don't only commemorate the Ascension at Ascensiontide, and so forth. Again, I quote Dom Gaspar:
"For in the Mass all the mysteries of Christ are brought into unity and presented here and now in what we may call numerical identity with their historical occurrence. This mystery, a truth which we can but partially understand, finds expression in the prayer immediately following the consecration: "Wherefore . . . calling to mind the blessed Passion of the same Christ, Thy Son Our Lord, and also His Resurrection from hell and also His glorious Ascension into Heaven" to which in medieval times was also prefixed the mystery of the Nativity, while the early Christians added Christ's Second Coming. Thus in one divine act the whole Christ-mystery, commemorative and eschatological, is actualized in the present" (Foreword, 2).
So, we may put it into a succinct phrase: every Mass is the life of Christ, whole and entire, through time and eternity.
It is helpful then to nurture our devotion at Mass to the other aspects of Christ's Life, as well as to His Passion. What I am going to do here is offer some possible examples.
In the Offertory, except at Requiem Masses, the priest makes the Sign of the Cross with his right hand over the cruet of water before pouring a small amount of water into the chalice filled with wine. Fr. Joseph Baierl, in his book, The Holv Sacrifice of the Mass, explains whv:
"The wine signifies Christ, Who does not need to be blessed; the water represents the faithful who obtain all grace by their union with Christ. The cross made over the water, therefore, reminds us of the truth that through Christ's death on the cross all grace and blessing come to the faithful" (p. 145).
In the Offertory prayer for the mingling of the water and wine in the Traditional Roman Mass, the following words are said by the priest:
O God, Who in a wonderful manner didst create and ennoble human nature, and still more wonderfully hast renewed it; grant that by the mystery of this water and wine, we may be made partakers of His divinity Who vouchsafed to become partaker of our humanity, Jesus Christ Thy Son, our Lord: Who liveth and reigneth with Thee in the unity of the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end. Amen" (St. Andrew's Missal translation).
We have in this ceremony a marvelous image of the Incarnation at its first instant in the Annunciation. We may see, in the mingling of the water and wine, the Divine Person with His divine nature assuming our human nature, as the Holy Ghost overshadowed Our Lady and the Man-God came into being as a tiny creature in her virginal womb.
Of the actual birth of Our Lord in time, the most obvious connection during Mass is the recitation of the Gloria in excelsis Deo, which begins with the words of the angelic host over the Shepherds' Field in Bethlehem. When the priest raises the paten with the host on it in the first Offertory prayer, the Suscipe, Sancte Pater, "Receive, O Holy Father", we can recall the way in which the aged Simeon took the Christ Child from his mother's arms there in the Temple and made his awful prophecy: "Behold this Child is set for the fall, and for the resurrection of many in Israel, and for a sign which shall be contradicted; and thy own soul a sword shall pierce, that, out of many hearts, thoughts may be revealed" (Lk 2:34-35). In that Offertory gesture is represented this key event in Christ's Infancy.
We can even link the words of consecration to a consideration of Our Lord's birth in time since the Passion is already present in figure and in the Divine consciousness of Christ. This is the message of the icon of Our Lady of Perpetual Help. St. Alphonsus de Liguori in his book, The Infancy of Christ, brings together a great deal of material in this regard. For instance, the swaddling clothes of the Christ Child foretell the chains and cords which will bind Christ in His Passion. The blood shed at His circumcision is significantly the first drop of His Precious Blood to be poured out as the price of our Redemption. And, of course, the Miracle of Transubstantiation makes the Incarnation substantially present to us.
The Public Ministry of Our Lord belongs not only to the proclaimed words of the Bible. We can enter into the mystery of Christ's Public Life by uniting ourselves to particular gestures of the priest. In the old Roman Mass, the priest raises his eyes to the crucifix on the altar nine times and in so doing imitates Christ Who raised His eyes to His Heavenlv Father while praying or blessing objects. When the priest leans with folded hands upon that altar he signifies that he depends entirely on Christ's help as the Apostles and disciples eventually learned to do. "For without Me," Our Lord says, "You can do nothing." (Jn 15:5). When the Pax is given at High Mass, the priest first kisses the altar and says "Pax tecum" to the deacon. We are at the Last Supper receiving the blessing from the Lord Himself: "Peace I leave with you, my peace I give you: not as the world giveth do I give unto you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid" (Jn 14:27). In these ways we may be drawn into the mystery of Our Lord's Public Ministry, from Galilee to the Cenacle in Jerusalem.
The consecrated Host is broken over the chalice to signify that Christ died a bloody death on the Cross with His Body mangled, His Blood drained. But what does the gesture of the triple Cross with the broken Particle stand for? The three signs of the Cross recall the three days in which Christ's Body lay in the tomb. The dropping of the little Particle into the chalice of the Sacred Blood immediately after with the Haec commixtio et consecratio prayer is an enactment of the Resurrection. By His glorious Resurrection from the dead the Sacred Body of Christ has again been re-united with the Precious Blood. The Eucharistic Christ we receive is the living Lamb of God.
In the priest's final blessing at Mass, we are brought to the Mount of Olives on the Thursday of Our Lord's Ascension, where, as St. Luke tells us, "And lifting up His hands, He [Jesus] blessed them. And it came to pass, whilst He blessed them, He departed from them, and was carried up to heaven. And they adoring went back into Jerusalem with great joy. And they were alwavs in the temple, praising and blessing God" (Lk 24:50b-53). Thus, with every final blessing we are drawn into the mystery of Our Lord's Ascension.
Devotion nurtures theological faith. We are not taking flights of pious fancy in an exercise such as this. Our limited intelligence cannot grasp infinite things, and so we necessarily make use of the imagination, in order to cooperate with the Holy Ghost's work on our souls. The Mass is the mystical Life of Christ and we are members of the Mystical Body of Christ. It only stands to reason, that if we are members of His Body then we must learn how to participate in His Life until we rest safely with the Beatific Vision.