' Father O’Grady looked at his watch, the server was late. He checked a feeling of irritability and was shocked by the difficulty he felt in checking it.
Was sanctity within his reach after all, he asked; could his great hands lay hold of it, he who never knew the sweetness of this complete act of love; the unbroken prayer, the whole hour of meditation, the work accomplished, the sensible sweetness of the sacramental word spoken; even one hour out of the twenty-four, unbroken, for his personal delight!
Could he who never knew that completeness in his soul, that inward closed circle of light, be a Saint?
Could his day of fragments be a day in a Saint’s life?
The answer came to him paralysing in its beauty; this broken life of his was the breaking of the bread, that in the broken bread, the whole Christ be given to his people. Soon, in a few minutes now, his people would be at the altar rails, opening their mouths like sparrows for their crumb of Life, and in their crumb of Life they would receive all Life, whole.
Father O’Grady paced up and down, rubbing his hands together to keep warm ---“Break me, dear Lord, but in the breaking of the Bread, be whole in Your Body upon earth!”
Lately, he had asked himself as he trudged home from the parish visits, what is the meaning of the lives of these unknown, insignificant people, who yet must somehow fulfil the strange prophecy, “And there are some of whom there is no memorial: who are perished as if they had never been born, and their children with them. But they were men of mercy, whose godly deeds had not failed.”
The priest was on the side of life, he had no other work, no other raison d’etre but to give life, and the life he gave could not be killed. He was not outside of the world’s love because he was a priest and alone, he was the heart of the world’s love, its core, because the Life of the World is born every day in his hands at Mass.
He looked at his watch again. How late the boy was! He tried to say the Acts of Faith, Hope, and Charity, to fill his mind with the words of the prayers to dismiss his distractions. But it was no use. This morning, distractions got the better of him, do what he would.
At last, a clatter outside proclaimed the arrival of the little server. How often Father O’Grady had tried to impress upon this boy that he represented all the Christians in the world before the Altar of God when he answered Mass, and how well the Christianity of the world should brush its hair and clean its shoes and wash its hands, to enter the Holy of Holies and offer the heart of mankind! Today he was even more dishevelled than usual, tousled, smeary, his bootlace undone, and it was apparent that the World had overslept and tumbled straight out of bed, and would today be even more than usually absent-minded and clumsy --- yet Father O’Grady looked at the urchin tenderly, all his irritability passed. After all the world is like that, late, distracted, grimy, but with a good if unstable will to serve; and might not this sudden new tenderness in the priest’s heart be a reflexion from aeons and aeons away, of the tenderness of the Eternal Father, waiting from eternity for the scruffy, sniffing, unconcentrated, often unwashed, imperfect, weak, and loving Christian world, to come to Him.
“Tie your shoelace,” he said, “and damp down your hair --- and here, flick your face with this wet towel, and hurry now, put on your cotta, and light the candles.”
And the dishevelled Christian World, transformed, in a smooth white cotta, with a wet golden curl, and nothing of ‘the old man’ left but the huge boots jabbing out from his cassock, walked out with the expression of a Botticelli angel, to light the candles for Mass.
Even during the few steps that he walked from the sacristy to the sanctuary, the humiliation of being himself left Father O’Grady. The emptiness, the dryness of his soul, ceased to matter at all.
He had only to give himself now, to give himself to the words and the movements of the Mass, to give his body, his hands, his tongue, to give his whole being, easily, unresistingly, to move through the groove trodden out for him, to move in it like water flowing in the deep groove in the rock, worn through the heart of the world by generations of the adoration of men.
At the entrance to the sanctuary, he turned to the congregation and said, “this Mass is offered for the people of the parish.”
There were only a few people present, the little server, a handful of old women, an Irish sailor, and a very old man. But since Christ was present in them, the whole Christian world was there, so all the people of the parish for whom Mass was offered were there.
The dockers already loading and unloading the big ships; the sailors who had just put out to sea, and the sailors ploughing their way home; the factory girls on their way to work, making the streets gay with their bright skimpy finery; the women scrubbing the steps with their arms up to their elbows in soapy water; the mothers washing-up the menfolk’s early breakfast before waking the children; the children sleeping the warm, woolly sleep of early morning; the marketers setting up their stalls; the flower women in their shawls and their gents’ straw boaters, carrying their great baskets of bronze and red and yellow flowers; the patients in the hospitals, newly washed and smoothed in cool white wards, the night nurses, pale and craving for strong tea and sleep; the day nurses pinning their starched caps, and wondering if it would be fried bread and bacon, or only fried bread for breakfast; the old folk in the workhouse, sitting quietly on their wooden benches; the prisoners in the gaol, looking up at the slit of silver sky, through the high, narrow windows of their cells: all were there, at the Mass that was being offered for them, the people of the parish.
Father O’Grady made the Sign of the Cross.
“In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost, Amen,” and bowed down under the burden of the sins of the whole world. His own sins were a heavy enough load, and now he bowed under the weight of all sin. But when he straightened himself up from the Confiteor, the burden of the whole world’s sin, and his own with it, had fallen from his back, and his shoulders were strong. For it was Christ who rose and went up to the altar ---Christ who had seen evil, naked, face to face, Christ who had been brought down to the ground under the world’s sin, to sweat His blood into the dust, and Christ who has overcome the world.
The Mass moved forward with beautiful precision.
“Kyrie Eleison.”
“Christe Eleison.”
Sharp, urgent little knocks at the door of Heaven.
“Gloria in Excelsis Deo ……”
The angel’s carillon swung into motion by the beating of a man’s heart, and onward, hurrying forward with the urgency of a lovers’ meeting. The bright, short prayers sparkling over the priest’s mind, bringing him swiftly to the Offertory.
He lifted the un-consecrated Host, light as a petal on its thin golden paten, and with it lifted the simple bread of humanity, threshed and sifted by poverty and suffering. He offered the broken fragments of their love, made into one loaf.
He lifted the wine and water mixed in the Chalice, and with it offered the blood and the tears of his people to God.
And God accepted the offering, the fragments of love were gathered up into the wholeness of Love, and nothing was wasted.
The Mass moved swiftly, hurrying forward as if the longing of generations had set its urgent pace towards the climax. But now the pace grew slower, charged with so immense a momentum of Mystery that it could only move forward in larger, fuller, slower gestures. The wonder rising like the rising of the tide to the flood. And as the Miracle came closer and closer, time ceased to be at all. Simply, effortlessly, directly the Mass moved, not backward or forward in time, but into the eternal now of the Last Supper. Into the stillness of the Upper Room, where the voice of Christ fell upon the souls of His Apostles, like summer rain falling upon the sown earth.
Slowly, exactly, Father O’Grady repeated the words of Consecration, his hands moved in Christ’s hands, his voice spoke in Christ’s voice, his words were Christ’s words, his heart beat in Christ’s heart:-
“Who the day before He suffered, took bread in His holy and venerable hands, and lifting His eyes to Heaven towards Thee O God, His all-powerful Father, giving thanks to Thee, blessed and broke and gave to His disciples, saying TAKE AND EAT YE ALL OF THIS, FOR THIS IS MY BODY.” Father O’Grady lifted up the consecrated Host in his short, chapped hands, the server rang a little bell, the sailor, the handful of very old women and the very old man bowed down whispering “My Lord and my God”, and the breath of their adoration was warm on their cold fingers.
Father O’Grady was lifting up God.
A cry arose from all over the world, “Come down from the Cross if you are the Son of God!” “Save yourself and us too if you are the Christ!”
But Christ remained on the Cross. His fingers closed on the nails. He would not come down from the Cross. He would not dethrone the children, He would not discrown the poor, He would not scatter the fragments of the bread of love. He would not break faith with sinners or fail the failing. He would not forsake the young men coming up to die His death.
“Come down from the Cross! come down! come down! save yourself and us!”
But Christ remained on the Cross. His fingers closed on the nails. The Crown of Thorns was in flower, the five ribs like the five fingers of the world’s pain gripped His heart, and His heart broke open and the river of the world’s life flowed out of it. A flood sweeping His heart and brain and flowing out into the tips of His fingers, swept through His Mystical Body. Through the eternal heart of Rome, through the lonely mind of her august Shepherd, out into the least and lowliest of men, and the last little infant howling at the touch of the waters of Baptism, the blood of the world’s life flowed into the fingertips stretched out on the Cross, measuring the reach and stretch and extremity and ultimate possibility of love.
“Come down from the Cross if you be the Son of God!”
“Save yourself and us too if you are the Christ.”
The world strained at the nails, wrenched and dragged, the Cross was shaken in the earth, bent like a tree in the storm, dragged earthward by the weight of man’s body, but it was rooted in rock, and the Cross was built to the shape of man, not man to the shape of the Cross. The world’s suffering was built and fitted to the size of each man, and the Cross stood.
“Come down, come down, come down!”
But Christ would not come down from the Cross.
The life of Riverside went on, the day’s work had begun, a ship was coming in from the sea, another putting out. An old man was dying, and a child was being born.
The little server rang his silver bell.
The people bowed down low.
Time stopped.
Father O’Grady was lifting up God in his large, chapped hands.
Christ remained on the Cross.
The blood and sweat and tears of the world were on His face. He smiled, the smile of infinite peace, the ineffable bliss of consummated love.'
Caryll Houselander
(Ack. ‘Book of the Saviour’ an anthology, published Sheed & Ward, 1952.)
