In the Quiet of the Church…
My children have their weekly religious education class (well the one they do at church anyway) in the hour between Sunday morning Masses. I have taken to spending this time in the church in prayer before the Tabernacle.
This morning while I was lost in prayer, I happened to look up and witness the most touching scene. The deacon was at the ambo preparing the Sanctuary for Mass when a young woman who is an Extraordinary Minister of the Holy Eucharist walked onto dais and opened the Tabernacle to obtain the Blessed Sacrament to bring to one of the homebound of the parish. The deacon’s attention was drawn by the slight noise behind him and seeing what was happening, he stepped quietly from the ambo and though he must walk with a cane, dropped to his knees in adoration. Totally unaware of the deacon behind her, the young woman finished her errand, genuflected, and slipped out the side door.
I was reminded of Thomas Howard in On Being Catholic:
When a Roman Catholic “goes to church”, he sees himeself as joining himself to something that is already going on. He sets aside both the hurly-burly of his domestic or professional situation and any preoccupation he may have with such patently excellent concerns as fellowship or chat or even a certain vitality in the air. He has been summoned to the unum necessarium. He here takes his place — literally, he believes — with angels and archangels and with all the company of heaven, who incessabili laud and magnify the Holy Name of the Most High, as the Te Deum puts it.
And though I couldn’t see it or hear it, it was as if the door cracked open and heaven was visible. And we knelt in faith and in hope and in anticipation….
