COMPASSIONATE CELEBRANT

 Compassionate Celebrant

The word “liturgy” comes from the Greek “leitourgia” which means “service” or “work” of the “people”. It more than meets the eye, is more than bells and smells and strange-sounding words, and requires more than an actor, a policeman or a scientist. The liturgy is about the very self-actuation of the Church as it reveals the very face of Christ whose presence is named in the action. Jesus Christ is the second Person of the Holy Trinity, and, as such, is in the dynamic of self-offering to the Father. Since his Incarnation he draws all men and creation into this majestic surrender; and we would do well to attach ourselves to him as individuals and as a body, the Church. The myriad galaxies with their myriad forms of existence and life are included in this magnificent makeover to God. This is the movement we commonly call sacrifice, from the Latin “sacrum facere” – “to make sacred”. As men of faith we need only affirm the existence of the subhuman species to place them on the cosmic trajectory to the divine. This is the cosmic liturgy which has been made possible by the Incarnation of the Word of God.

The Word now reverberates in the “Liturgy of the Word”, and the world awakens to present its ambassadors – bread and wine – that gladly melt into the furnace of divine love to visibly proclaim the apex invention of God, the Holy Eucharist! Man and universe gasp in wonderment at this unspeakable humility that enables the God-man encounter to bear fruit in man’s divinisation. Every crumb of host contains his whole presence; every cell in our body contains our unique DNA. We recognise the sacred nature of both as we absorb God with our very gut, flesh and blood.

The liturgy is indeed personal, but cannot be celebrated without the community of the Church, the world and the cosmos, for “God still loves the world” that he created by his love-word: “let there be”. There is no one and nothing that God does not call his own, and the liturgy is there to celebrate it.

This is why “sacrifice” (such a convenient action-word), indicates the “making sacred” of the world and its people that henceforward do not belong to themselves but to God; for whatever or whoever is of God is sacred. This is the heart of human and ecological dignity.

The Word creates, builds, consoles and compassionates. We need only contemplate the High Compassionate Celebrant, Jesus Christ, who, while remaining divine, is the résumé of created nature in his dynamic intent towards God. And by that very token he takes us deeply into the wonder of our own human mystery and the astonishing mystery of the cosmos, thereby igniting a fierce desire to rescue the world as “body of God” from injustice, poverty and violence. These are issues crying for attention, which should not be sidelined in pursuit of ritual purity and doctrinal orthodoxy (though these are important in themselves). Liturgy that refuses to engage with the raw realities of life and death is reduced to a tinkling bell and a meaningless melody. Compassion is the heart of the Word and the Gospel of life, which is more than priestly cult and grudging servanthood. Keep in mind that the original meaning of liturgy is service!

 Blessed Pope John Paul II wrote: “The Incarnation of God the Son signifies the taking up into unity with God of everything that is flesh and that is cosmic, the first-born of Creation unites himself with the entire reality of humanity, within the whole of Creation”, proving once more that liturgy is intimately human and utterly universal.

“My paten and my chalice are the depths of a soul laid widely open to all the forces which, in a moment, will rise up from every corner of the earth and converge upon the Spirit” (Teilhard de Chardin).