The Rev Dr Richard J C Major

THIS IS A SERIES of twenty articles on the Mass, as it has been celebrated throughout the Church for a thousand years, and as it is still celebrated in this remarkably traditional parish. The series is not meant to be academic and it isn’t scholarly; nor is it exactly devotional. I’m merely asking exactly what is happening as the massive and elaborate rite runs along on its stately progress: asking precisely what goes on, and why, and what each bit suggests we are to think and feel and pray about – and then, I hope, answering these questions. That means slowing down the rite (which in different senses goes both slowly, and very quickly), so that we can examine it almost frame by frame, as they do the Zapruder film. In the same way, music-lovers sometimes open the score of a symphony on their laps to see how the harmonies work, bar by bar. But the goal of their probing is to throw the score aside and listen to the symphony again, more intensely than before. So with us. I hope when we’ve finished poring over these twenty still photographs of the Mass we can forget about them, and attend to the gorgeous motion of the rite undistracted, but with a more vivid sense of what is going on. This seems to me the proper Christian method:

ORABO SPIRITU ORABO ET MENTE : PSALLAM SPIRITU PSALLAM ET MENTE
With the spirit I shall pray, and with the mind : sing psalteries with the spirit and with the mind also.

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