The Eucharistic liturgy as it was celebrated at The Church of St. Mary the Virgin would have appeared elaborate to a first-time visitor. Many things seemed to be going on. Clearly, much more than a meeting was occurring.

For example, right at the beginning came a solemn procession, with cross, candles (or “lights” as they are called in this tradition), incense (or, rather, a censer, or thurible, full of coals but not yet smoking with the grains of incense, which would be sprinkled on the coals presently), acolytes, and finally the clergy in richly brocaded vestments. During the next ninety minutes or so, there was endless moving about, all with the greatest solemnity and the greatest austerity, and all of it, clearly, carried on in obedience to some overarching set of directions, the way a symphony or ballet must proceed in rigorous obedience to the score or the choreography. A newcomer, even a very devout Christian believer, unfamiliar with these things, might have been inclined to put it all down to elaboration for its own sake.

What this newcomer would presently have discovered, if he had returned often enough, would have been that, far from this ceremony’s being an elaboration, it was, rather, an unfurling, or a clarifying. It presented an exact, visible diagram of the whole gospel, accessible to literate and illiterate alike. No gesture was superfluous. Nothing was done for the sake of mere vain show. Nothing was mumbo-jumbo. It was pompous, to be sure, but not in the miserable modern sense of that word. Rather, here was pomp in its earlier, richer sense of high ceremonial things’ being done obediently.

There is a curious sense in which it may be said that the more elaborate the celebration of the liturgy, the simpler it is, since in a high mass everything is visible. Nothing is implicit. The diagram is complete. The peasant and the philosopher, and all of us in between, may encounter as much of the gospel as our capacities can sustain, since the whole drama is there.

On the other hand, a high mass has no meaning and no validity other than what is also present in a crust of brown bread, a paper cup of cheap wine, and a few Christians gathered in a hovel or on a beach to remember the Lord’s death. We may recall that the hood of a jeep has often furnished the table for men about to go into battle, and we may be sure that the Host who invites us mortals to His table will feed us with the same food whether the surface is tin, linoleum, or marble.

The liturgy takes somewhat different forms in the various ancient traditions in Christendom, so that a Western Christian, for example, might find himself bewildered at first in a Syrian, Armenian, or Russian church; but he would recognize before very long the familiar “shape of the liturgy,” as it is called. For no matter how the liturgy may differ in details, language, or ceremony, from tradition to tradition in the Church, it always enacts and proclaims certain unvarying elements.

The liturgy always begins with the synaxis, which simply means the “coming together” of the people, and it always moves to the Great Thanksgiving, or Communion.

The synaxis is usually called “the liturgy of the Word,” for in this first part of the Christian liturgy the Scripture is read and preached. In most traditions there will be readings from the Old Testament, the Epistles, and the Gospels, with the Psalms also used at certain points. This part of the liturgy includes the sermon, or homily, the Creed, and sometimes the intercessory prayers. In the early Church, outsiders were permitted to come to the synaxis so that they might hear the Scripture read and preached and possibly be converted. Also, the “catechumens,” that is, new believers who were being prepared for baptism over several months of instruction, were present at the synaxis.

When the Church came to the Great Thanksgiving, all outsiders, and all unbaptized believers were sent out. Now the Church came to its holiest mysteries, and only the fully initiated could participate.

This makes it sound cultic to our modern ears, accustomed as we are to the happy gregariousness that wants above all else to fill up the church auditorium. There is a sense in which it was, indeed, and still should be, “cultic,” if by this we refer to holy and even in some sense secret mysteries, and not to the heresies and fevered conventicles to which the word cult is usually applied now. Even to speak of secret mysteries at all is to conjure for most people a dark picture of obscene grottoes, bacchanalia, saturnalia, and Eleusinian rites.

To be sure, the Christian mysteries share with those depraved rites at least this, that the god really is believed to be present and that what is occurring is incomprehensible to the uninitiated. But the difference between the two is the difference between heaven and hell, between holiness and obscenity, between liberty and bondage, between reality and fraud.

The following description presents the liturgy as it is widely celebrated in the Western church now. The sequence we see here resembles the sequence that took shape over the first century or two of the Church’s life, which one can read about in very ancient descriptions of Christian worship. The account given here includes only the principal sections of the liturgy. Technical manuals explain things in far greater detail.24

To see the choir, servers, and clergy entering the church in procession during the singing of a hymn is very common, although strictly speaking the liturgy itself has not yet begun. (The Orthodox church has a somewhat different view on this point.) But the church, that is, the people of God, is gathered now and begins to enact what is true, namely, that the Church here on earth, together with the Church in heaven, moves in its worship to the place of God’s dwelling. The procession follows the cross up to the altar, a vivid picture of what is indeed true: the Church does approach God covered by the cross. Everyone in the congregation and all Christians everywhere are “in” the procession as it moves toward the altar, singing with angels and the saints of all ages.

The celebrant begins the liturgy with the words, “Blessed be God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” The people answer, “And blessed be His kingdom, now and for ever. Amen.”

This, in a nutshell, is the whole of worship,25 This is the song of the morning stars at the Creation; it is sung by angels and archangels and all the company of heaven; we mortals were put here on earth to sing it; arid we will sing it forever in Paradise. Hell hates this song. Evil cannot sing it at all. For in it is gathered up the joyous order of heaven and earth, namely, that God is to be blessed by His creatures.

This is the very thing that all creatures—all angels, and all men, and all beasts and creeping things, and all floods, thunders, dragons, and great deeps—were made for. To learn to sing this is to begin to approach a joy that is unimaginable to the worldly mind. We see what God is and what He has done, and we, with the whole creation, respond with “Blessed!” Pride and egocentrism see the same thing and abominate it. Here is the difference between heaven and hell. The liturgy unfurls heaven for us. It is a tutor, so to speak, teaching us the vocabulary of heaven.

The celebrant then says the Collect for Purity: “Almighty God, unto whom all hearts are open, all desires known, and from whom no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of thy Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love thee, and worthily magnify thy holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.” We want to be enabled to worship God, and pure hearts are required of those who will come into the Divine Presence (see Ps. 24:4; Matt. 5:8). Therefore we ask in this prayer for pure hearts.

Then follows an ancient hymn. There are five of these that occur during the course of the liturgy, and it is the musical settings to these that one hears in a mass by Palestrina, Bach, or Mozart, although most congregations sing them to simple tunes or even say them. The first is the Kyrie, or, to give it its whole title, the Kyrie Eleison (pronounced kee-ree-eh ay-lay-ee-zawn). This is the Greek for “Lord, have mercy,” and if the congregation sings it, it is almost always sung in English.

To the early Christians, “Kyrie!” was an acclamation like a shout of greeting to an emperor and not a penitential cry at all. With the addition of the petition “Have mercy” Christians understood the Kyrie as making a request appropriate at the beginning of the liturgy because everyone needs the Lord’s mercy to be received by Him and to worship Him. It is fitting because it bespeaks an attitude that is right and healthy for us mortals at all times. We live and move and have our being in God, as indeed the whole Creation does. The whole universe depends on His mercy, and we humans appear to have been assigned the special task of articulating in behalf of all mortal creatures what the rest of them cannot put into words: supplication, thanks, adoration.

Hence, it is right that we have these cries on our lips frequently, but not because, like the pagans, we fear that this God might not have mercy or that we will not be able to get His attention. Christians from nonliturgical traditions sometimes wonder whether this cry does not betray a faulty faith. Has not God already had mercy on us? Why ask for it?

Just as it is appropriate for us to say often to the people we love that we love them, even though it has been true for years, or for us to thank the Lord for His goodness even though we thanked Him yesterday for the same thing, so for our own sakes it is healthy to keep on our lips what is true always and daily, namely, that we owe our well-being to His steadfast mercy. There are many requests like this in the New Testament. “Thy kingdom come,” the Lord taught us to pray, even though God’s kingdom has come and will come whether we join in the prayer or not. But prayer is at least partly a matter of our placing ourselves in the right postures and attitudes. It does no good to pit doctrines like God’s sovereignty (He will do what He will do) against the command that we pray. In a mystery, He wants our prayers. No formula throws a single glint of light on the relationship between whether we pray or how much we pray and what God does.

In festal seasons of the year, instead of the hymn Kyrie, the Gloria is sung. All Christians are familiar at least with the opening lines of this hymn, since it is what the angels sang at the Nativity: “Glory be to God on high, and on earth peace, good will towards men.” The Gloria is a hymn of pure worship. It supplies us with words we might have to grope for if we were left to our own resources. There is nothing about our own feelings and experiences in the Gloria. Like the Te Deum, and like the task of worship itself, its task is to ascribe worth to God, not to express feelings or to share experiences.

Another very brief canticle is sometimes sung here, known as the Trisagion (“thrice holy”): “Holy God, Holy and Mighty, Holy Immortal One, Have mercy upon us.” It is an exceedingly ancient hymn in the Church.

Then follows the Collect for the Day. In one sentence, this prayer makes a request of the Lord, usually in the light of the particular gospel event or idea that the liturgy for that day remembers. For example, on Easter we ask that we might die daily to sin and live in the joy of the Resurrection, or on the Ascension we ask that “we may also in heart and mind thither ascend.” This brief prayer strikes the note for the liturgy of that day.

The reading of Scripture follows the Collect for the Day. Such reading has been central to all Christian worship from the start and to Hebrew worship before that. It is necessary to place ourselves under the Word of God. At the end of the reading of the Old Testament lesson, and of the epistle, the people respond with “Thanks be to God.”

This is far from being an empty formula. “Thanks be to God” may not be at all what one feels about what he has just heard, which might have included some very jarring words from a prophet, or a demanding bit of teaching from Saint Paul. One might be much more inclined to murmur, “Not for me,” or “Much too severe.”

But the liturgy teaches us to say, “Thanks be to God,” for if we could see all things clearly, we would see that the Word of God, even in its most frightening and taxing aspects, is liberating and life-giving to us. It points the way to fullness and joy for us; so that even where it jolts us, it is our very health.

Once again, the liturgy “imposes” on us the right thing to say; thus helping us along our way to the place where the external rules and the internal responses of our hearts coincide. Such a state of affairs is called sanctity, and it is synonymous with freedom; the righteousness anticipated by the Law, and given to us in Christ, has now become a living reality in the inner man. The liturgy is a tutor in this school.

The reading from the Gospel is the high point of this part of the liturgy. The Old Testament reading has anticipated it, and the Epistle has commented on it; but in the Gospel itself we have the Lord’s own life and words. In many churches the Gospel reading occurs from a point in the aisle, with the people surrounding it and facing it, enacting the idea of the Lord’s speaking His words to His gathered people from their very midst. The people respond to the reading with “Praise be to thee, O Christ.”

After the Gospel is read, the Word is preached. Since liturgical worship is a whole and single act rather than a collage, we do not need to hunt for special items in it that qualify as “worship” as opposed to other items that are peripheral. The preaching of the Word is not a pause or a diversion in the liturgy, even though it may take the form of instruction, reproof, warning, or consolation. Faithful preaching will always take the people along the way towards the altar of God, as it were. It is part of the mystery of the Church that to her has been given the task of guarding and teaching the Word of God. According to the New Testament, not everyone in the Church has authority to teach officially, and no one at all has a warrant to bring private interpretations to the Scriptures. This is what spawns heresies, and it is against the clutter of private interpretations that the teaching office of the Church stands.

The people respond to the preaching of the Word by standing and confessing together the Faith to which this preaching has turned their attention. The ancient Nicene Creed is used here. It spells out in detail what Christians believe to be the irreducible core of the gospel. It is not a mere doctrinal outline; it is a confession, not in the sense of penitence for sin but in the sense of a glad telling out of what the Church believes. The “facts,” or mysteries, that we list in the Creed are what rouse adoration in our hearts and songs from our lips.

The Prayer of Intercession, or as it is sometimes called, the Prayers of the People, follows the creed. The Bible teaches that Christ is in heaven as our high priest, offering intercession for us. But His is not a solitary priesthood; He has made His Church a part of it. Saint Peter teaches that we are a royal priesthood. Priests make offering, and part of the offering which the Church shares with her High Priest is the offering of intercessions.

In prayer, as with the Sacraments themselves, we find ourselves on the frontier between time and eternity. Logically it does not make sense; God’s will is going to be done whether we ask for things or not, or so it would appear. It seems nonsense to think of our changing either God’s mind or the crushing onward movement of history, especially when we pray for general things like peace in the Middle East or for starving millions somewhere. If our religious training has taught us that praying is mainly a matter of our making specific, private, “answerable” requests, we may have some difficulty with these sweeping and general public intercessions.

We may recall, however, in this connection, that the mystery of prayer goes back to the beginning of things and that we have been commanded to pray. No doubt, only eternity will reveal the connection between the march of history and the continual offering of intercessions by the people of God. Meanwhile, the liturgy obliges us to enter into the ministry of intercession, which our High Priest offers at the Throne.

The one item among the Prayers of the People that might arouse more questions than others, at least among Christians unaccustomed to the practice, is the prayers for the dead.

The hesitancy about prayers for the dead generally runs something like this: the dead are certainly beyond our reach, and their fate is now in God’s hands. It is inappropriate to pray for them, since their story is finished.

The reply might run like this: which of our requests, big or small, does not touch something beyond our reach? And where else but in God’s hands is the fate of anyone, living or dead?

The notion that a man’s whole story is finished at the precise point of physical death and his destiny fixed and sealed is not made clear in the Bible. The text, “. . . it is appointed unto man once to die, but after this the judgment,” in Hebrews 9:27, which is often advanced in discussions on this point, tells us nothing more than what is obvious: we die once, and then begins the whole business of “judgment,” whatever that may entail for every soul. The Bible does not vouchsafe us much light on how, much less when, our stories reach completion in the realm beyond death.

What the Church prays for in its prayers for the dead is twofold. First, it prays for the believing dead, that the work of grace begun in them in this life will go on until they reach “the measure of the stature of the fullness of Christ.”26 The Bible does not oblige us to think either that this work of grace halts in its tracks when physical death occurs or that it is suddenly rushed to miraculous completion.

Once more, we must not confuse time with eternity. How that process of glorification is completed we cannot imagine, but neither our pictures of “one instant” or of “aeons” tell the story quite adequately, any more than our notions about obstetrics tell the story of the Virgin birth. Presumably Abel, the first man to die, will not have been dead any “longer” than the man who dies an instant before the last trump. So we pray for the believing dead, trusting that because of Jesus’ Resurrection we have one unbroken fellowship with them. We deny death as an ultimate barrier.

Second, the Church prays for all the dead. This is more difficult, since it looks as though they might have gone completely beyond the pale of prayer if they have not been part of the fellowship of the Church. But they are still part of the huge fabric of Creation, and nothing in that fabric is beyond the scope of mercy. We cannot tell God what to do with them or speak with any certainty of what He is at any given point doing with them, but we can commend them to the mystery of His mercy, as we commend all things thus. We must not be too hasty or fierce or cavalier in reaching conclusions about the judgment that Scripture spells out. God is the judge; we are priests, part of whose ministry is to offer prayer for all people.

At the end of the Intercessions, it is not uncommon to find the Confession of Sin. All Christians are familiar with the practice of private confession, in which we bare our hearts to God. In the public, general act of confession in the liturgy, we place ourselves in a right attitude by saying what is true, namely, that we have in fact sinned in thought, word, and deed, and that we need God’s forgiveness. Left to our private feelings and resources, we might gradually drift from this stark awareness. Here again the liturgy is our teacher, giving us the words to say and thus assisting us to enter rightly into the corporate worship of the Church.

The priest does not himself forgive our sins: He declares God’s forgiveness on the basis of Christ’s merits alone. The priest is not a mediator whom the Church has interposed between Christ and us. Rather, his is the voice we hear, declaring that it is God who forgives sins. Because we are flesh and blood creatures and not pure intellects, it is a great help to us to hear these words, audibly and coming from outside ourselves altogether. In the absolution, as in the entire liturgy, we are lifted away from the tangle of our private efforts to believe and grasp these great things. We find ourselves in the realm where they are declared to be true, no matter how feeble our own faith or how despondent our feelings may be.

The peace now follows. It is perhaps one of the most ancient exchanges of all in the liturgy. Here we offer each other “the peace of the Lord.” As with the opening acclamation of the liturgy, so here, we the Church are the visible, audible, flesh-and-blood sign and herald and presence on earth of the kingdom of heaven whose citizens always fervently and joyfully offer each other this peace.

Once again, hell hates this, and sin does its best to destroy it; but in the liturgy we proclaim and enact it and resolve that it will be proclaimed and enacted in our attitudes and acts during the rest of the week. Quite appropriately, we are asked by the liturgy to exchange this greeting, this kiss of peace, with whoever happens to be near us at the moment: spouses, siblings, parents, friends, strangers, and even people who irritate us, perhaps even our enemies. We do not have the luxury of picking and choosing the ones we might prefer to greet thus. Charity greets everyone indiscriminately with this greeting. The liturgy gives us an elementary lesson in charity: “Salute one another with an holy kiss.”27

The exchange of peace brings the synaxis to an end. Now the Church moves into the Great Thanksgiving, or the Communion, The first act here is the Offertory.

The liturgy does not huddle the collection of money into a sort of parenthesis called “Announcements and Offering,” Since the entire action of the liturgy is an offering of thanks, of adoration, of ourselves, and of our substance, all taken up into the one perfect offering, and thus made acceptable—since this is so, everything that we bring is hallowed. Indeed, the gathering and offering of money is part of the same movement in which the bread and wine are brought from the back of the church to the altar, since all of it represents the common stuff of our lives, the firstfruits and substance of our work and of ourselves.

Bread and wine are universal symbols representing the common stuff of human life. In the liturgy, as in Redemption, that common stuff is taken and “transubstantiated,” if we will, and given back to us by God as the food of eternal life. He does this with whatever we will offer to Him. Suffering itself, a purely negative thing from a worldly point of view, can be thus transubstantiated and become glorious, if it is made into an offering. We glimpse at this mystery in the Offertory.

In response to the Offertory, the two ancient hymns Sanctus and Benedictus are sung. In the Preface to these, the celebrant says the following words: “It is very meet, right, and our bounden duty, that we should at all times, and in all places, give thanks unto thee, O Lord, holy Father, almighty, everlasting God.” Then, after a “Proper Preface,” which links this acclamation with the special focus of that day’s liturgy, he continues: “Therefore with Angels and Archangels, and with all the company of heaven, we laud and magnify thy glorious Name; evermore praising Thee, and saying,” whereupon the people join with, “Holy, holy, holy, Lord God of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Glory be to thee, O Lord most high. Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord. Hosanna in the highest.”

In the words “Therefore with Angels and Archangels” we find articulated especially clearly the notion, already touched upon in these pages, that in its worship the Church finds the veil between earth and heaven drawn aside. In the greeting “Hosanna!” we greet Him who came to Jerusalem on a humble donkey and who now comes to us in the humble forms of bread and wine.

The great Eucharistic Prayer now follows. In most forms of this prayer, we find a rehearsal of God’s mighty acts in Creation and Redemption, leading up to the words “This is my Body. . . . This is my Blood.” It seems to have been the pattern for this prayer, established early in the Church and followed everywhere since.

Other major elements in this prayer have been the Unde et memores and the Epiclesis. In the Unde et memores we declare to God that what we are doing we do in obedience to Christ’s institution and in remembrance of His Passion and Resurrection. In some form of the Epiclesis, or “calling down upon,” we beseech the Holy Ghost to come upon us and upon the bread and wine, so that what is intended by the liturgy will indeed, in very truth, occur, since without the Holy Ghost the liturgy is a charade.

At the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, the Lord’s Prayer is said, and then the celebrant breaks the Bread, in full view of all the people, saying, “Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us.” The people respond with, “Therefore let us keep the feast.”

One of the great fears expressed by Western Christians who broke from the Eucharistic tradition of the Church in the sixteenth century was that the language of the liturgy seemed to imply that Christ’s sacrifice, which had manifestly occurred once in history, was being repeated every time Mass was said. But the arguments on both sides of this question have too often ignored the sense in which the liturgy, like prayer itself, pierces through mere time and, in the mystery of anamnesis, “makes present” that which has indeed occurred only once, and once and for all.

No human formulary can quite satisfy us here. Christ died once, but his broken body and poured out blood are given to us now in the Eucharist. His sacrifice, made from the foundation of the world, was brought about in our history under Pontius Pilate and is always present in the heavenly temple, as it is in the Eucharist here on earth. This has been the Church’s faith since the beginning.

The hymn Agnus Dei, “O Lamb of God, that takest away the sins of the world, have mercy upon us . . . grant us thy peace,” may be sung just before the people receive the bread and wine. After that, the liturgy ends very simply with a prayer of thanksgiving and usually, then, with the blessing and dismissal: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord,” says the deacon.

“Thanks be to God,” we respond.

The dismissal is immensely significant. Whereas the central mysteries of other religions have beckoned the faithful farther and farther into the murk of the shrine, away from the plain light of humdrum human daily life, the Christian mysteries, dark and impenetrable as they are, land us immediately back in that plain light. What we have celebrated at the altar is not only meaningless, but a sacrilege, if it is not carried thence and made present to others under the species of our flesh and blood. It has been the Divine Charity presiding at this altar, and that was the Charity that gave Himself for the life of the world, Insofar as we claim access to that charity at all in the Eucharist, we ourselves become vessels to bear It to a hungry world, as the bread and wine have brought life to us. What are we but the Body of Christ?

“Thanks be to God!” we say, which is to say, “Eucharist!” Even this phrase is freighted with meaning. The Christian life is not drudgery. Like Christ’s life, which was an unceasing eucharist, so this life offers its thanks to God unceasingly, even while it is being broken for the life of the world.