… Here comes the priest

We are in our pews, recollected and ready to worship.  Suddenly, we stand! Why? Well, when we are at a wedding, and the bride starts walking down the aisle, what do we do? We stand, of course!

During the Mass we don’t have a bride, but we have a groom. That’s right, a groom. Isn’t the priest the “stand-in” groom? He stands in for our Lord Jesus Christ – the Church’s groom – as we get ready for the great wedding feast, the Banquet of Heaven, the Holy Mass. That’s one of the reasons.

The biggest reason, though is the fact that standing is a sign of readiness and respect. For instance: when someone we respect comes into a room and we are sitting down, we stand up, as a sign of courtesy. By the same token, if we are sitting down and someone asks us to do something, the first thing that we do is stand up, right? Right. So here we are, on our feet, ready ,willing, joyful and straight. (Singing the entrance song would also be a good thing!)

That’s not the only time during the Mass that we stand. We also stand to listen to the World of our Master – the Gospel; we stand when we pray as a community (during the petitions and the Our Father); we stand when we praise together: when we, in one voice, proclaim our Faith during the Creed (which means “I believe”) and when we loudly give glory to the God.

When we stand together, straight, without fidgeting and slouching, and with one voice, praise the Lord in song and in prayer, we look like the army that we are (or we should be). The army of the Lord, ready for spiritual battle, ready to serve. And, by the grace received in the Sacrament of Confirmation, that’s exactly what we are: the soldiers of the Lord, His army on earth. We’ve come to church together so that we can support each other, pray for each other and be strengthened by the Holy Food of Heaven that we receive during the Holy Mass.

Beating of the Breast

Behold! the Army of God is ready to do His will and… we begin beating our breast. That is, we do if the priest uses the Confiteor, (a Latin word meaning “I confess”) during the Penitential Rite.  What’s a Penitential Rite?

Penitential Rite

It’s an act of humility. It is the acknowledgment of our weakness before the Creator. We ask the Lord forgiveness for all the sins that we have committed since the last time we were at Mass or we went to Confession. This is what we proclaim, in once voice, standing before God and before the congregation.

… I confess to Almighty God, and to you my brothers and sisters, that I have sinned through my own fault, in my thoughts and words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do… In other words, the first words that we speak, after we sing the entrance song, are words of repentance, of humility, in the awareness that we stand in front of the One who is the Holy, who is all Goodness, who is Perfect, and we acknowledge that “You are God and I am not.” That we really need His help to go to Heaven and that it is only through His mercy that we are saved.

Why breast-beating? It sounds Medieval! No: it’s from the Gospel, of course. Remember the parable of the Pharisee and the tax collector? The Pharisee stood proudly in front of the altar of God, telling the Lord what a good boy he (the Pharisee) was. Telling God that He was lucky if someone as wonderful and as worthy of notice as himself, had actually stopped by and said “hello” (hmmmm, sounds familiar?). At the same time, on the other end of the synagogue, was this poor tax collector (in Jesus’ days, tax collectors were considered the biggest of sinners!) who, aware that he was indeed a sinner, “Would not even lift his eyes to heaven, but beat his breast saying: O God, be merciful to me, a sinner!” (Luke 18:13). Jesus concluded by asking His disciples: “Which one of the two do you think went home forgiven?” I bet we know the answer to that! So, here we are, striking our breast. Why can’t we just say the words? Because like everything we do in our lives, our words and our actions go together, the actions of our bodies bring the message home to our brains.

Here is what our friend, Fr. Guardini, hast to say about this: “What is the significance of this striking of the breast? All its meaning lies in its being rightly done. To brush one’s clothes with the tip of one’s fingers is not to strike the breast. We should beat upon our breast with our closed fists… it is an honest blow, not an elegant gesture. To strike the breast is to beat against the gates of our inner world in order to shatter them. This is its significance.”

… More Calisthenics to come …