I imagine a priest-worker gathering his friends together in his shabby little room in the industrial slum: the day's work is over; he is going to say Mass, but first he will talk to them: what might he say; Perhaps something like this:

If you look out of the window there, you can see nothing but factory and tenement buildings; down there in the grey street there are children who have never heard the chuckle of a brook o r seen a meadow filled with buttercups or felt the clean wind peeping across the hills; all around us there are men and women who have grown up like that, and who have lost touch with reality because they are severed from their roots: almost, you could say, they have ceased to be part of the universe, and when a m a n ceases to be that he ceases to be a human being in any full Sense. Modern man has used his intellect, his reason, to great effect within certain narrow limits; but he has lost the instinctive life the intuitive life: he has no symbols.

Though a study of the liturgy is undertaken to find the meaning of, to get behind, so to speak, the elements (the words, actions, things) of the Church's ceremonies, it may seem a little strange that we should look for a symbolical meaning of necessary a receptacle as a chalice or cup in any religious rite in which a liquid is used. But man's knowledge begins with the senses. Metaphors, sensible (corporeal) representaons or similitudes are not only natural to man but naturally pleasing to him—for which reason St Thomas says, it is fitting that pmtual things are given to us by means of metaphors drawn from corporeal things, sub metaphoris corporalium.

Man has always tended to express his religious or spiritual ideas in terms of his physical environment and his reactions to it, in terms of things that are vital and familiar to him. Though this anniiarity has perhaps clouded the modern sophisticated mind, the Principle remains fundamentally true.

The christian liturgy is first and foremost an opusoperatum. It is something much bigger than the deed of any one of us and than our own personal devotion. It is something that is first of all done apart from us, that has its own worth and power independently of our effort. We enter into its mighty current and allow ourselves to be borne along by it; our part, the opus operantis, is to allow ourselves to be subject to its power, to be covered over with its glory.

It should not surprise us that the christian liturgy is thus primarily an opus operatum. The christian liturgy stands at the heart of the christian religion; and the christian religion is first and foremost an opus operatum. It is not just a technique of spiritual culture; many pagan religions are that. Nor is it just a way of worship; that too can be found outside the Church. No, it is first and foremost the mighty act of God who in Christ is reconciling man to himself, and giving us in Christ a mediator and a great high-priest.

The Eastern Church has never ceased to share in that wonder expressed by St John in his First Epistle concerning the Word of Life, ‘Which we have heard, seen with our own eyes, contemplated, touched with our hands'. That man should handle the Divinity—that the Divinity should stoop and empty itself to the utter annihilation of the Cross, that a meeting between death and life, heaven and hell, creature and Creator should have been made possible within the limits of our human space and time—that the divine energies should have reached and penetrated human frailty—that all this is not a thing of the past but an ever-present reality—the only true reality of this transitory life—such is the intimate conviction expressed in all the liturgical texts of the Byzantine rite and lived by the faithful.

There is only one centre of life: the ceaselessly unfolding, ever present drama of the incarnation, life, death, resurrection and ascension of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which culminates in the revelation of the Blessed Trinity at Pentecost and the birth of the Church—that new creation within which the deification of man, or in other words his union with God, is made possible.

The central act of the liturgy is the mass. It is an act in two senses, that of something done, and that of drama in the highest order. But despite the amount written round it in recent years, the idea of being a spectator only still infects many, perhaps the majority, of lay men and women. The mass remains a service which we attend, not a sacrifice which we offer. Some of this vagueness is due to the care necessary in separating the priest from the people, in that we say the priest alone has a priestly function, by ordination, while the people are in no way priests, even though they too share in the offering. This is inclined to cloud the part of the people, to obscure the public nature of the mass. For the mass is by nature public and social, whether it is said in the solitude of the Sahara by Charles de Foucauld or in the Piccadilly-Circus crowd of a London Midnight Mass. The priest offers sacrifice for the whole Church, for the living, for the dead.

A priest of my acquaintance once told me that when he was a young religious, he had had a great devotion to the divine office. In order to get the best out of it, he decided to make a careful study of the psalms. So he got out the best commentaries and studied their meaning in Latin and Hebrew; and when he had finished, he found that the psalms had ceased to have any meaning to him as prayer at all. This is, perhaps, an extreme example, but it illustrates a fact of great importance, namely, that prayer is not necessarily an exercise of discursive thought, and that study of a certain kind can be an obstacle rather than an assistance to prayer.

There is no doubt that for a great many priests and religious, if not the majority, the divine office is not a congenial method of prayer. It is a duty which has to be performed, which has its own special grace and virtue, but it is not generally felt as a personal method of prayer and approach to God.

One of the most significant features in modern Church life is no doubt the interest taken by the laity in the liturgy. The liturgies of the Mass and of the Sacraments of Baptism, Holy Orders and Extreme Unction in particular invite us by the variety of their ceremonies and texts to follow them in all their details and, in fact, are well known in both their historical development and their present form. There is perhaps one lacuna in this liturgical discussion. Apart from the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist, no Sacrament is more frequently received by us than is the Sacrament of Penance; and yet we rarely hear of the liturgy of this Sacrament and its history. In fact, some Catholics might be surprised at the application of the term ‘liturgy’ to the Sacrament of Penance.

In his Encyclical The Mystical Body of Christ, the Holy Father has complained of a neglect, at present found in many countries, of the Sacrament of Penance.

One of the most interesting and fruitful developments of Eucharistic theology in the past fifty years or so has been the re-integration of the Mass into the doctrine of the Mystical Body. When Père de la Taille's Mysterium Fidei first came out in 1921, the reactions were shock and amazement that he should speak of the Church offering the sacrifice of the Mass. From the time of Bellarmine onwards it had become common form to say that Christ offered the Mass—of course through the ministry of his priests (with the part of the laity reduced to a hardly visible minimum), and the implication was that the Church as such hardly intervened at all. And it is significant that the content of the liturgy was allowed little or no influence in building up the theology of the Mass. Similarly, Protestant controversy forced the emphasis onto questions concerning the Real Presence (sacramentum-et-res), and the res sacramenti, the ultimate effect (the unification of the Mystical Body, to quote St Thomas), was all but ignored.