The Introit ~ “The Mass in Slow Motion”

Right now, at our daily Masses, the priest is going through the parts of the Mass during the sermon. It is very enlightening.

Msgr. Ronald Knox did the same thing in his book “The Mass in Slow Motion” in a very particular style. Here he is talking to High School students, and he comes down to their level…which can be very helpful to all…and not without some smiling here and there.

Now we come to one of the really exciting points, don’t we; the point at which you have to find your place in the missal, so as to show the girl next to you that you are pretty well up in these things. I mean, if you take any trouble about it beforehand – I bet you don’t – you will have your thumb firmly fixed into your missal at the fourth Sunday after Epiphany before the Mass starts.

What does the priest do? He puts on his spectacles. Up to now, all that he has said is something he says, word for word, every day of his life, except in the Requiem Masses when he leaves out the psalm Judica.

But now we have reached the point at which the Mass begins to be changeable, the Introit. The Introit I said this morning was that of the fourth Sunday after Epiphany, not the same as St. Winifred’s yesterday: or the Holy Souls on Friday, or All Saints on Thursday.

Priests are apt to develop a rather self-satisfied way of saying the Introit, as if to imply, “Now we really are getting down to it”.

Do you ever get taken out to lunch at a restaurant by an uncle? And if so, don’t you find that he sits down, pulls out his spectacles, and looks through the menu saying or as if to say, “Well, let’s see what they are giving us today”? Same old spam of course, but that gesture of his survives from the days of plenty.

The Introit is a bit like that; it is a foretaste of what the Mass on this particular day is going to be about. In form, it is a short sentence, followed by the first verse of a psalm, followed by “Glory be to the Father,” followed by the short sentence again.

The short sentence is what is called an antiphon; if you come into chapel by mistake when the nuns are saying Office, you will find that they say an antiphon at the beginning of each psalm, and repeat it at the end.

By rights, of course, the priest ought to say the whole psalm as part of the Introit. That would have meant, yesterday, that before getting on to Kyrie eleison I should have had to say the whole of the 119th psalm, which is 176 verses long. That would have made your breakfast very cold.

But the Church, in her great kindness for our insides, has arranged that we should only say the first verse of the psalm, and then call it a day and go on with “Glory be to the Father.”

After that, probably, we ought to settle down and sing the Litany of the Saints. That’s what happens if you go to Church on Holy Saturday; the Litany is sung, while the sacred ministers all lie flat on their faces on the altar steps. The same thing happens at an Ordination service. The Mass, on solemn occasions like that, has remained unchanged all down the centuries; and probably in very early times Mass was like that every day.

If I said the Litany of the Saints every morning after the Introit, even if you were pretty nippy with the responses, that would add a good ten minutes on to the Mass, and breakfast would be getting colder than ever. So the Church has arranged another let-off; instead of saying the Litany we just say the Kyrie eleison, to remind us that the Litany ought to be there.

I expect I really ought to be flat on my face. Anyhow, that is the mood we all ought to be in just then; we ought to be groveling. Perhaps you will complain that we groveled enough last Sunday. But I must remind you again, till we are all sick of it, that that beginning bit isn’t really part of the Mass.

The Introit begins the real Mass, and after the Introit we go on to the real grovel. The point is that whenever you approach Almighty God in prayer you ought to be bowled over, at the very start, by the thought of his unutterable greatness.

Outside space, outside time, almighty, unconfined, incommunicable, without parts or passions – what can induce Almighty God to take any notice of us, to take any interest in whether we are saying Mass or not? We ought to feel like flies going round on the wheel of a tank; that’s how we ought to start Mass, start all our worship of God.

Don’t start by thinking of Him as a sort of cozy Friend waiting to listen to you and wanting to be told how abominably you were treated in geography class; that’s all right for later on, but the first thing is to grovel.

So we say Kyrie cleison, which you won’t find in your Latin grammars, because the words aren’t Latin, they’re Greek. I expect you know that in Greece and in the Balkan States and all over the near East – all the part that used to belong to the Turkish Empire and now seems to be getting mysteriously swallowed up by Soviet Russia while we look the other way -Mass is said not in Latin but in Greek.

That is true, not only of the Eastern Christians who have been in schism for the last thousand years and don’t acknowledge the Pope, but also of the Catholics who live in that part of the world; they are allowed to go on having Mass in Greek because they always have.

The Greek habit, apparently, was just to go on saying, “Lord, have mercy on us”. It is only in the Latin Mass that the words Christe eleison have been introduced, so that the whole thing has got into a tidier sort of pattern; we say three Kyrie eleisons to God the Father, three Christe eleisons to our Blessed Lord, and then three Kyrie eleisons to the Holy Spirit.

That means four Kyrie eleisons and one Christe eleison for me, two Kyrie eleisons and two Christe eleisons for the server, if we both remember to count right.

But the general effect is meant to be just mercy, mercy, mercy – it’s not so much that we ought to feel beasts because we are sinners, as that we ought to feel worms because we are creatures; however holy and pious we were, we should still want to start by telling Almighty God that he is Almighty God and we are a set of perfectly ridiculous creatures; when we have got that into our heads we have begun to get the Situation clear.

A full and complete family, is one in which brothers and sisters all dwell together in tender love. We all know such homes, where the family life is full—and the family fellowship close, caring and happy; where parents and children, and brothers and sisters—live together in sweet accord, and where the music of the daily life is like an unbroken song of holy peace. Wherever there is such a home, its blessedness is almost heavenly! -J.R. Miller

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Beautiful Blessed Mother And Child Wire Wrapped Rosary! Lovely, Durable. ~ Available here.

The Mass in Slow Motion ~ Available here.

The first of Ronald Knox’s three “Slow Motion” collections, The Mass in Slow Motion comprises fourteen sermons preached during World War II to the students of the Assumption Sisters at Aldenham Park. Modest yet arresting in style, Knox explains the Mass from the opening psalm to the solemn words of conclusion: Ite missa est. Indeed, their primary impetus is the powerful portrayal of the continuous action of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, in which formula yields to mystery and man participates in his own salvation.

The Creed in Slow Motion ~ Available here.

In the opening sermon, Knox links the Credo to the Confiteor to emphasize the fundamentally personal nature of faith. “It is always Confiteor we say, not Confitemur, even when we are saying it together. Why? Because my sins are my sins, and your sins are your sins; each of us is individually responsible. So it is with the Credo; each of us, in lonely isolation, makes himself or herself responsible for that tremendous statement, I believe in God.” As a consequence, the one worthy of the grace to say Credo is also responsible for being ready to say it with proper understanding. Preached with the full homage of Knox’s wit and intelligence, The Creed in Slow Motion is a certain aid for achieving that readiness.

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