The Mass

Tonight after Confession I was reading the words of Saint Augustine regarding how he questioned each aspect of nature and was told, "He made me, but I am not He". It's funny to think of it that way, but it's true. Yet in the course of the Mass we come face to face with Him eventually, and were we to ask, the answer would be, "I Am, He".

I was reminded of this in a strange way last week. It was a foot and a half of snow and climbing as I trudged through it to Mass. The roads were completely covered beyond the ability for any to drive on them, the windchill was biting. I could barely move by the time I had hiked to the church building. Yet we had 29 people when you count the priest, one of them an old woman on a walker who could barely move with it inside of the building, yet she hiked there. Some of them apparently homeless, who had come to help clear the sidewalks for people who tried to make it there. During the Nicene Creed however, when the time came, every single head was bowed in proper reverence. We were an astounding cross-section of ethnicity and walks of life, but we were there to worship Him, to come and ask, "Are you He" and to hear, "I Am, He".

When I went back to my old Baptist church for my grandmother's Christmas Eve service, I realized how hollow everything felt. Maybe it was the songs, the constant extollings to worship Him, the perverted altar with drums rocking and a small house built on it, or perhaps it was the sermon which decried the Grace of God as not enough... Looking about it was, for the most part, those who had survived the purges of dissenters, the rich, the preppy, the elite. I think a part of me that could not before, now understands the likes of Blessed Teresa of Calcutta; I would rather worship alongside the least of society in Truth than be bound alongside the rich who deny Him.