It rather forms a circle, and only where that circle is closed there really life is able to be shared. When we receive a gift and we do not thank for it, then that gift really is not a symbol or does not carry or does not bring about union of life and spirit between the giver and the one who has received the gift. So also if somebody speaks to us and finds only passive silence in us and no response, then the life which the word carries into our hearts really cannot develop.

[01:01]

No union between the one who speaks and the one who listens is produced in that way. But the word wants an answer. Really, the hearing of the word of the Scripture is not only a being taught, a certain truth about God which we would not be able to find on a level and with the means of natural reason or philosophy. But the word that God speaks to us in Holy Scripture is a personal word, is a gift, therefore, in which God shares the inner secret of his heart with us. and therefore it has to be answered. If a greeting is given to somebody, I say good morning, coming down in the morning and meeting other members of the family, and there is dead silence, then the greeting is like a bomb that doesn't go off.

[02:20]

The greeting falls into a vacuum. But a greeting is meant just like a kiss to establish and to share life and establish the union of life. If it is not answered, that union of life is not established. So also Holy Scripture is really not a means to learn about God, but it is the place where we meet God. in a living, personal encounter. And therefore the word that God speaks to us has to be answered in the echo of the congregation of the Church. And therefore that's so beautiful too in the Mass of the Catechumens that, for example, the epistle is followed by the gradual, which really is the answer of the people,

[03:23]

to the message received and, in a wider sense, we may perhaps also call the cradle, which the community in our present Roman mass sings after the Gospel and the homily, also that we could consider as an answer to the word received. as the word which is spoken to us in the gospel, the word of God made flesh, is the word of saving love, the word of redemption, the word of resurrection and of life, so also is the credo, our personal answer. And that is also well expressed here in this passage, which is unusual in the Mass, I mean in the first person singular, credo, I believe.

[04:28]

Certainly the reason for that is because the credo has its original place in baptism and not in the Mass. And baptism is, of course, the sacrament of the one upon whom God dwells. puts his hand and whom he calls by a new name, and therefore credo I believe. But now the mass, the credo has penetrated into the mass at this place as the answer of the people to the revelation of God's word in the mass of the catechumens. And I think it is, if we speak here about the cradle in the context of the Mass, I think it is good to remind ourselves that the quintessence, really, of our Christian cradle is that it's summed up in the words of Saint John the Apostle, I, my brethren, believe in charity.

[05:40]

Really, the object of the cradle is the divine agape in which God the Father descends to us through his Son. That is really the meaning of the cradle. It would be beautiful to relate every proposition of the cradle to this basic fact, that it is our faith in the God who has manifested himself to us as love. Deus caritas est. God is love. That is the great central Christian revelation as formulated by St. John the Evangelist. Deus caritas est. God is charity. And from there, immediately also, the Trinity can be understood, as St.

[06:46]

Augustine says so beautifully in his work on the Trinity. Ubi amor ibi Trinitas. Ubi amor ibi Trinitas. Where there is love, there is the Trinity. And so also this revelation of God as the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit is really the revelation of the inner life of God as the life of charity. Father is a term of charity, the Son is a term of charity, and the bond of perfection, the Holy Ghost, a term of charity, the gift. So we believe in God, but as Christians we don't believe in God as the God of the philosophers, But we believe in God the Father. Our Christian understanding of God is essentially specified by the word Father.

[07:48]

And by this word Father we do not mean, as the heathen may be, the well-meaning, highest God who has a certain gracious attitude towards his creation or so, but we mean by God the Father, God as the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. Our God is the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. We cannot know him as the Father if we don't recognize him as the Son. Only through the Son we know him as the Father. So, and the Holy Spirit, and this Holy Spirit is then in the Creed, more or just as the word son is specified by the work of redemption, as it is summed up in the Creed, which is the work of the divine charity which has urged the son to die for us, to be buried, and to rise for us.

[08:57]

So also the Holy Spirit is in the Creed specified by the great manifestations of divine charity in the Church. The first fruit of the Holy Spirit is the communion of love, the divine, the agape, Saint Ignatius of Antioch calls it in his Epistle to the Romans, where he addresses the Church of Rome as the president of the Caritas, of the Agape, meaning by that the entire Church. So the Church is, as it were, we may call it, the body or the manifestation of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of divine charity, Therefore, she's one and holy and Catholic and apostolic. And we believe in one baptism for the remission of sins, which again shows that the essence of baptism is that it is the instrument of the divine charity for the remission of sins.

[10:09]

And I wait for the resurrection of the dead. and the life of the world to come. So the creed, therefore, especially also the resurrection of the dead, such a beautiful and total manifestation of the divine charity as prefigured in that beautiful prophecy of Ezekiel, where the dry bones lying out on the field, then receive through the agency of God's Spirit again flesh and life and rise again. A wonderful picture of the all-embracing, all-powerful healing effect of the divine agape. Therefore, because this Credo is essentially a belief in God as charity, therefore also the Credo is the best bridge to the next part of the Holy Mass, the Mass of the Faithful.

[11:37]

The sacramental action into which we now enter, which starts with the offertory, is reserved to the faithful. That means to those who are fully initiated into the mystery of divine agape. And, of course, we are initiated into the mystery of God's love for us only through the spirit of his love. So, therefore, when, if the sacramental action to which we enter now starts with the offertory, that means, again, with the bringing of our gifts, then in explaining the inner structure of the Mass to the people and making it also clear to ourselves, we have to be, of course, again fully aware of the fact that just as the first part of the Mass of the Catholic humans, I mean this process of gathering together, is preparatory and by no means of the same level as the announcing of the Word of God,

[12:56]

so is also here the offertory, not on the same level as the sacramental action, which later is introduced by the words, lift up your hearts, so that that step on a new level is so clearly indicated. Therefore, again, I would consider it as a dangerous mistake in explaining the... the sacrificial part of the Mass of the Faithful to the people by saying, first we give to God, and then, let us say, God gives to us, always provoking this impression that we do the first step, and then God waiting for us doing the first step, then he will do the second step. That is just the thing which would really distort the true order of divine revelation and of our redemption.

[13:58]

The love of God simply is the love with which he loves us first and in which he dies for us when we were while we were still his enemies. So also the offertory, therefore, as the bringing of our gifts, It's by no means everybody knows that, of course, the sacrifice itself. But it is just, again, a preparatory gesture. But one must also say that this preparatory gesture now, again, is itself not our initiative, but it is the spirit, the charity of Christ which presses us in the afterlife. It is that living word of God's charity which we have received in the mass of the catechumens which now urges us to, now let us say to, offer to God, but what?

[15:03]

And there we can learn so much from the offertory. First of all, the fact that the offertory starts with the invitation of the priest, Oremus, let us pray. The historians of the liturgy here point out very often that this probably is the introduction to what we call today the oratio precatio communis that we still find in the Gelasian sacramentary, the oratio gelasiana, that litany which was at certain times sung and in which the general, therefore oratio communis, the general needs of the Church of Christianity were presented to God at this moment.

[16:07]

Personally, I think that in the, let us say, arranging of a liturgical rite, it seems to me quite improbable that the liturgists, you know, who, let us say, arranged these things, should have, let us say, proceeded in this way, that they said, now here's that The Lord be with you. And then the Oremus of the priest. But then, you know, one has to add a long explanation, one has to add, yes, but the prayer that really belongs to this Oremus has dropped out of the picture, out of some really, for some unknown reason or doesn't know. I don't think that that is... really a realistic view. I don't think one does that, that one lets stand, the oremus should be left standing, and the prayer to which this oremus belongs would be kind of dropped.

[17:23]

I think that this oremus here, and that, of course, is, to my mind, is kind of a general principle in the explanation of the mass as a ritual. We should really take it and understand it as it is, not always with the supposition that some people who didn't know what they were doing have messed it all up from the beginning to the end. It's so strange that a similar attitude is more and more, unfortunately to my mind, being applied, for example, to the explanation especially of the Old Testament, of Genesis and other books. If one reads modern commentaries on Genesis, even those that are written for the public, One finds to one's amazement, you know, always explained that this text was originally probably this in this way, but that the redactor didn't understand what he had done and therefore had put the things together that really didn't belong together.

[18:45]

That, to my mind, is a poor way of trying to reach and to decipher, so to speak, the mystery of Holy Scripture. And so I think it's also a poor way of explaining the mass. I would rather advise to take the retus as it is and to see really with a listening heart, now, maybe it makes sense. And to my mind, it really makes a wonderful sense that the offertory position that means that part opening part of the Mass of the Faithful, in which we bring our material gifts to the altar, this part of the Mass should start with the invitation, Oremus. That corresponds completely to an old, old Christian custom, which we see also still so beautifully at work

[19:52]

In the Eastern Mass, you know that in the Eastern Mass, the offertory is always started with a so-called great entrance procession. this great entrance procession where the priest carries the hosts and where the deacon carries the chalice, and in solemn procession they enter through the royal doors. Now, why the priest and the deacon with their gifts approach the royal doors. Then one can see how the people come and approach the priest, even touch his garments and whisper their prayers in order to, as it were, to put their intentions upon the gifts, unite them with the gifts which are there now carried to the altar.

[20:55]

and to consecrate really and to lift up an externally, to say, material event, charge this event, as it were, with the spirit. The Christians had always before their eyes, and especially in Rome, one can see it until this day, one goes to the Forum Romanum and sees these big altars from the time of Trajan, the emperor, and there are these tremendous sacrifices of enormous bulls and magnificent examples of boars and of, what is the, not sheep, you know, what is the, what's the word? Heifers. Heifers, and then what is the masculine of sheep?

[22:01]

Right. rams, you see, and rams, you see, rams, and so on. The whole business, you know, in tremendous possessions, you know, and all that, the whole thing depends, evidently, or depended in those sacrifices on the quality and the number of the animals which are being put to death. in these sacrifices. So the accent was absolutely on the quantity and the material quality, unblemished and so on and all that, of the things that were offered, of the beasts that were offered, the unreasonable beasts, you know. while the Christian sacrifice is definitely oblatio rationabilis, or is, as the Greeks used to say, tisia logicae, that means sacrifice in the spirit.

[23:04]

So wherever, and that was the, as I say, that was the concern of the church, that at the moment where Let us say the material things enter into the divine worship. This entering of material things into the divine worship should take place immediately in the sign of the Spirit, in the power of the Spirit. And the expression of the Spirit is prayer. And that is exactly, you see, the fulfilment of the prophecies of Isaiah, of Jeremiah, who had criticised a sacrificial service in the temple in Jerusalem which had degenerated into a material killing of animals and a material, so to speak, a material security which people try to derive from that.

[24:18]

And therefore the prophets in the Old Testament, we find that as a burden coming up again and again. I don't want sacrifices but obedience and mercy. Our Lord himself has made that word his own. And therefore, at the moment where the sacrifice begins, the first thing that the Church emphasizes is that this is a sacrifice in spirit, that this is a sacrifice in obedience, that this is a sacrifice in divine mercy. so that therefore the offertory procession is the answer from the part of the people to the invitation of the priest, let us pray. I think that is a wonderful in itself, a wonderful order of things. We know very well how touchy also people in our days are and how much reason they partly have, you know, to say, to suspect, you know, that the church and saying mass and all these things are a wonderful racket because they...

[25:36]

evidently pay. See, there people come in, the first thing they have to do is pay seat money, and then comes the first collection, then comes later on a second collection, maybe sometimes a third collection, you see, which, of course, is extremely dangerous, as we know. But if it is made clear, you see, too, that this, what is offered today, and today is... I mean, what is offered is money. If that is part and follows the invitation of the priest, oremus, then, of course, it immediately takes on a new light. It is not any more that anybody could say, here, now, here, I give this, you know, I give a dollar, I put a five-dollar note into it, and look what I do now, really, something, you know. So this relying on the quantity of what is being given is...

[26:39]

made impossible by the invitation of Remus, if people only would realize what they are doing and what they are asked to do. A ramused prayer is not possible without absolute humility, without absolute obedience. Whatever we do, we don't do in order to exercise some pressure and put some pressure on God in favour of some kind of intention or wish of some earthly nature that we may have. But oremus means an absolute surrender to God's omnipotence. It is spiritually a proskynesis, a prostration, which takes place before we go to the altar and indicates the spirit in which we go to the altar. That also accounts for the fact that St.

[27:44]

Augustine already emphasized and asked for so much that the offertory position should be accompanied by song. Song is the expression of love. Who loves, sings. Quiamat cantat, St. Augustine says. Quiamat cantat. Therefore, the singing is the expression of that spirit of love in which we offer our material gifts. It is really these material gifts are an expression not of any human stinginess but of the spiritual abundance that is alive in our hearts. These gifts have a meaning before God only when they are, and as soon as far as they are, the expression of that inner spiritual abundance, and therefore, as it is said in Scripture, a cheerful giver.

[28:53]

That's the giver whom God loves. So therefore, singing the offertory, we approach the altar with our gifts. God loves a cheerful giver, and these gifts are the expression of the abundance of the Spirit which is already in the faithful, and which is the fruit, as it were, of the word of redemption that they have received in the mass of the catechumens. The same idea is also expressed in the kind of gifts which were offered and which again are being offered at the offertory position. Because these gifts are, as Tertullian expresses that so beautifully, they are gifts of the brethren for the brotherhood. Munera fraternitatis munera.

[29:59]

They were gifts, for example, for the support of the priest. They were gifts for the poor of the parish. They served, therefore, the community purposes. They were the bread and wine which were going to be consecrated during Mass. and therefore an expression of fraternal brotherly love. I shall never forget the Christmas night when I assisted at a pontifical mass in the Abbey Church of St. Matthias in Trier in Germany, where at the offertory after the pontifex had invited with his oremus When these masses of people got into motion and moved towards the altar, everyone, each one, had a package. That was his gift for the Christmas gift for the poor of the parish.

[31:00]

And, of course, this tremendous basilica clouded with people, and then all bringing, each one bringing their gifts to the altar, and the gifts being received by the acolytes, and then they were, how would you call it, they were stacked around the altar, and there were real mountains of these gifts all around the altar. So it was a wonderful picture in a concrete way of celebrating the nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ, who became our brother by becoming man, in seeing, you know, his altar surrounded with the gifts of the faithful for the poor of the parish. That is there, the whole power and beauty of Christian worship, and also, I would say, its absolutely practical social meaning comes to such a wonderful manifestation.

[32:07]

One really sees it. It becomes tangible evidence that what we do at the altar is a source of wealth and of gifts which are poured over the poor of that congregation. Therefore, they are an expression of that brotherly love which also accounts for the fact that this offertory procession at the time of the offertorial in the Eastern Church even now, the kiss of peace is being given, remembering the word of our Lord, If you bring your gifts to the altar and you remember that you have something against a brother, first turn around and get reconciled to the brother, and then come to the altar and bring your gifts, which again shows that the gift is nothing in itself, and that the gift is only something as the expression of the selfless love of the Holy Spirit which is already active in the faithful who here really act as priests and in virtue of their confirmation.

[33:24]

You can say that the offertory procession is one of the most beautiful expressions of the graces that we have received in the sacrament of confirmation. The sacrament of baptism, as St. Thomas explains it so simply and beautifully and truly, is the sacrament of personal salvation, but the sacrament of confirmation as the sacrament of the fullness of the Holy Spirit makes us full citizens of the city of God and therefore makes us responsible for the salvation of others and not only for the salvation of our own individual person. And this full citizenship of the citizen and the city of God and his responsibility for the whole is expressed in a concrete way in these offerings of the brotherhood which are being brought to the altar here at the offertory at Holy Mass.

[34:32]

And the very one can add, you know, that the very four, I mean the very... the form of the gifts which are being offered. The bread and the wine, they themselves express exactly the same idea. St. Augustine, who was such a wonderful guide for the people and for the simple people into the mysteries of the church, he explains it so beautifully. He says, When you see the bread lying on the altar, think what that bread is. It's you. It's the church. Why is it you, he says. No, because just think for a moment how this bread came into existence. First it was all the grain was gathered together from the fields. And that were, that are the souls that are gathered together from the fields of paganism.

[35:37]

But then each one of these souls still has around it the shell, this individual shell of selfishness. And therefore the grains have been thrown into the mill. And then through stones, you know, that go over it in two different directions, there this shell of selfishness is broken in the spirit of contrition. in the spirit of repentance, contrition, a contrite heart. And as soon as that shell of selfishness is broken in contrition, then the inner marrow comes out, you know, and that forms the flower. But this flower is still without any consistency before the water has been added. The water binds it, and the water is the common faithful. The water is the water of baptism.

[36:39]

Baptism is the sacrament of faith, one faith that unites the souls of the faithful into one dough. But the dough, of course, cannot be eaten before it has been put into the oven to be baked by the fire, and the fire is the Holy Spirit. So the... The dough becomes bread in the sacrament of confirmation. And then it can really be sliced. One slice after the other can be taken off. Then everybody can eat from it. And so it is a picture of the faithful. And the same for the wine. There are the individual grapes, and these individual grapes are thrown into the winepress, and there the skin is broken of selfishness, and the blood of the grapes flows out, and that is fermented, the fullness of the spirit, and then becomes clear wine.

[37:51]

So the bread as well as the wine are beautiful figures of the faithful in their repentance, in their faith, and in their charity.

[38:03]

@Transcribed_v005
@Text_v005
@Score_94.17