Tuesday, November 29, 2011

New Words (Re)new Meaning (1)


The Mass is meant to transform us every time we participate.  It is an intimate encounter with the God who loved us into existence.  We experience him in each other and the Eucharist we share.  The language for this encounter is not like the language of a novel, the newspaper, or television.  It is a language that tries to connect us through Sacred Scripture and the Tradition of the Church across time and beyond a single place.  It has a vocabulary that would not translate outside of its context: spirit, love, death and resurrection, salvation, redemption, consubstantial, incarnate, Lamb of God.  And it has the capacity to reveal the beauty of the eternal love of God to a people who, whether they know it or not, need that love for life. 

We are the people who know, and we gather in a faith that can help us make sense out of this language, to help us make sense out of our lives.  We gather to enter into the dialogue, to participate in that interaction that transforms, and to open ourselves to God’s action in our lives.  The new language of the Missal can help us to break old patterns of rote response so that we can enter more deeply into the prayer that is transforming.




(Information in this post was compiled by Fr. Pat, Jonathan, and Suzanne.)

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