To be Catholic is to attach immense importance to the recurrent, regular act of going to church.

If pressed, many good Christian people would find it difficult to put forward compelling reasons for such an act. To hear the Word preached, perhaps: this would be volunteered by a great many. But of course one can hear the Word preached via radio or television without going to the trouble of dressing, driving, parking, and so forth. There must be more to it than this.

Yes. We are not to forsake “the assembling of ourselves together”, St. Paul tells us. We try to be obedient to that injunction. But of course there are all sorts of assemblings: suppers, meetings for special prayer or fellowship, parish business meetings. In what sense do St. Paul’s words oblige me to present myself most particularly for worship? I am happy to come to any number of church-sponsored assemblies: but her worship occurs just when I have my best chance to be with my family and to relax with tennis or golf. And yet gathering for worship seems somehow to take priority.

There must be more to it than mere assembling. Christians from the very first days after Pentecost have made it their habit (1) to assemble (2) for worship. Both components in the matter—both the coming together as a group and its specific and limited purpose, namely, for worship—both components belong to the essence of the matter. One can, of course, worship as one walks alone on the beach, but this is not the specific activity known to Christians as the Church’s worship, and it will not suffice even for the individual believer to make this solitary activity his characteristic worship. And no matter how busy an agenda of meetings a given parish has, the chief one—nay, the exclusively mandated one—is the meeting for worship.

To be Catholic is not only to have both components in mind; it is to see both as deriving from the very nature of God and man and, hence, as touching the very essence of what the Church is. Assembling. Worship. Why insist on things being just so?

To come at the answer to this we may hark back to Catholic theology itself, which is sacramental. That is, the Church, in keeping with the whole scriptural rendering of things, teaches that in the realm of salvation the physical world has not been huddled offstage, so to speak, but has been swept in, along with the whole creation, to the precincts of the holy, so that physical things (bread, wine, water) may become the very points at which the unseen and eternal touches the seen and temporal.

It is a natural religious tendency to huddle the physical offstage: hence the great appeal of all forms of gnosticism. We mortals like to think of ourselves as “spiritual”, which of course we are; but in our eagerness to think thus, we often blithely jump out of our flesh-and-blood selves and talk as though we were pure spirits, disembodied. The poor flesh is left on one side both in our imaginings and in our religious exercises. For nonsacramentalist Christians, it is permitted to sit or stand perhaps, since how else shall we dispose ourselves for religious gatherings. We may speak and sing and listen, since these activities indicate what is in our thoughts and our hearts. But let us not kneel or bow or make physical gestures like the sign of the Cross, or sprinkle things with holy water and hail our olfactory nerve-endings with incense: all of that is too heavily physical, and we know that the physical has been set aside by the New Testament.

No, says the Church. No, says the Bible. No, says our humanity. The New Testament was inaugurated, not by the Word of God arriving through the ether, but by that very “Word” arriving and lodging in the womb of a woman. And then this coming of the Word to us proceeds on its way with a Visitation, when its cousin, also in the womb, leaps in recognition, and with a Circumcision, and hunger and fatigue and tears, and finally thorns and flogging and Crucifixion.

Very physical, this New Covenant. But of course then things rise to pure spirituality surely? Yes, if we mean by this that a New Creation is now inaugurated. But if we mean that all is now restricted to thoughts and spirits, and the human intellect and will, then no. A body comes back from the dead; whatever this body is, it is not a phantom. It has wounds, not illusionary wounds; and it can eat. And it is “taken up into heaven”: again, the Bible and the Church speak of this as an actual event, not a mere idea. It is an event, however, that occurs on the frontier between the seen and the unseen, and between the temporal and the eternal. No one can plot out the trajectory of the Ascension or speak of acceleration and speed and distance in connection with this mystery: and yet it is all real, somehow—even literal, even physical. The very words real and physical and literal are “born again”, so to speak, when they appear in this New Creation: but they are not empty metaphors. They summon us to the mystery that presides over this frontier between the seen, as we are accustomed to it, and the unseen, which reaches beyond our mortal imaginings.

And it is on this very frontier that Christian gathering for worship occurs. It matters that the people—embodied men and women and children—show up. It is not good enough that they remain at home, an invisible “church” connected by good will and a commonalty of belief. Even telephone hook-ups won’t do. We must all be here, under this actual roof (or in this field, if that must be), in our bodies. Catholic theology, because it is wholly sacramental, has already set the stage for this physical assembling. Catholic theology has for its native turf this frontier land between the “physical” and the “spiritual” (again, the words themselves seem to overreach their commonplace significance), where the temporal touches the eternal and becomes the very vehicle of the eternal (a womb: an infant, blood, bread, wine, water). This is the very region of sacramentalism. It is the region in which we find ourselves when we have gone to the trouble to get ourselves up and out of our several houses across the city and have collected here in close juxtaposition with each other.

We are now more than a crowd. We are more, even, than an audience. We are a congregatio. This, said our Greek-speaking forerunners in the faith, is the synaxis—the gathering. It is a physical event and a physical presence that reaches far deeper than mere psychology, which might volunteer that it’s nice to get together; togetherness achieves an ethos; we all find ourselves encouraged and stirred and revivified in such an ethos.

All of that, to be sure, says the Church. But that is thin gruel next to the Christian (sacramental) substance brought into actuality by the collecting together of these people in their bodies. What you have here is an epiphany, really: you see “the Church”.

That might seem so painfully obvious as to be anticlimactic, after all of this sacramental build-up. But we will have failed to grasp the fully Christian meaning of things if we suppose that to say “the Church” here implies simply these believers who happen to constitute this chance crowd, come together to sing, pray, and hear the Word, since that is their custom.

Again, all that is certainly the case. But again the Catholic Church teaches that in this particular gathering (as opposed to the same people assembled for fellowship, a conference, or a supper) the Church herself appears. For in the liturgy—the Mass, that is: the act of worship as understood by Catholic Christians—the eternal Church, Spouse of Christ, is constituted, here, in this place, at this hour, by this gathering. The eternal, that is, has appeared in time and place, under sacramental species. We are “the Church”.

But then what of the ten thousand times ten thousand others who surely must be included in any talk of “the Church”? Millions have gone before us through death, for one thing: and millions are scattered all over the globe, not here. We cannot call this little company “the Church”.

Yes, we can, says the Church. For in the liturgy the scrim that divides the seen from the unseen is drawn back in more than a merely psychological way, and the whole Church in heaven and on earth is here, just as the whole of the Godhead was there in the manger even though the Holy Trinity was also “in heaven” and “omnipresent”. No diagrams will help here. The riddle (Christians call these things mysteries, and sacrament is the Latin word for the Greek mysterion) outrages all that is calculating and rational in us. Nevertheless, it is so, says Christian faith.

The whole Church is here. We may see nothing but some bent and doddering figure in threadbare vestments at the altar and one old man in a pew. Behold the Church! says the Church. Angels and archangels and all the company of heaven are present, literally—and again, “literal” outstrips its ordinary suggestion of the tangible, the visible, and the spatial: those are qualities that belong to the physical world, and that world is only one ingredient, so to speak, in any sacramental situation, which embraces the whole fabric of creation, the physical and the transphysical.

The priest and the old man; the straggling noonday gathering of shoppers and tourists at St. Patrick’s on Fifth Avenue; the troops bobbing in the LST en route to Normandy Beach; or the half million in St. Peter’s Square with the Bishop of Rome himself at the altar in front of that gigantic facade: here and at any Mass in Peoria, Billings, or Cape Horn we may see the Church.

In this sense Catholics do indeed differ from their fellow Christians who also “go to church” but who would scarcely see anything mystical, much less sacramental, in the crowd they form when they have settled into their pews. A Catholic is (or ought to be) acutely conscious of crossing a metaphysical line, as it were, when he goes to church. He sees himself as both summoned and invited: summoned to appear before the Sapphire Throne and at the same time invited to a Supper.

To this extent, of course, any Christian, Catholic or not, may share the profound sense of occasion that broods over such a summons from such a king and such an invitation from such a host. And on the surface of things, we must admit, Catholics do not differ very much from their Protestant fellow believers: both tend to arrive in church somewhat distracted, chatting, looking around to see who is there, and generally only very poorly disposed in the inner man.

But Catholic custom plucks us by the sleeve, we may say. There is a holy-water stoup just inside the door, for a start. When non-Catholics see Catholics dab their finger at the water and make a hasty gesture that may or may not touch forehead, breast, and both shoulders, they conclude that this is merely a bit of mumbo-jumbo that is part of one’s being Catholic. The little ritual is, to be sure, part of one’s being Catholic, but it is neither “merely” nor mumbo-jumbo, if by mumbo-jumbo we mean meaningless superstition. To touch oneself with holy water in the form of a cross is to acknowledge, on the deepest possible level, that one wishes to be found among the company of the holy—the angels, saints, and all the redeemed—and that one is thereby aware of his own need both for cleansing and also for being specially set apart for service in the Holy of Holies. The water, which has itself been “blessed”, that is, set apart for use in connection with holy things, speaks to him of his baptism, in which the stain of original sin was washed away and which he must daily recall so that he may order his life, day by day, in the light of this washing. It reminds him of the washing so scrupulously observed by the priests of the Old Testament when they readied themselves to offer sacrifice in the Tabernacle, since he is himself a member of the priestly people set apart to offer sacrifice in the holy place where Jesus Christ’s own self-offering has superseded all the Old Testament sacrifices. And the sign of the Cross he makes, having dipped his finger in the water, announces, first to himself, then to all of heaven, earth, and hell that he enters this holy service only insofar as he is found “under” the Cross of Jesus Christ, to which he clings for salvation. There is no other refuge. Apart from this Cross, he is an outcast. This alone is the sign and the reality to which he must bind himself if he is to be numbered among those bidden into these precincts.

It will have been noticed long since that it is physical matter (water) and a physical gesture (the sign of the Cross, entailing one’s hand and arm) that bear this immense freight of significance. Nothing is more natural to a Catholic, supported as he is by the Church’s teaching on sacrament: of course the physical—matter and gesture—is to be brought into play in the service of what is true. Non-Catholic Christians often find it difficult to grant to any mode other than words this task of bearing significance. Gestures begin to look like magic: such is often the suspicion. A Catholic, if he is taxed on the issue, can readily point to all the other human situations in which we call upon gesture rather than mere words to be the carrier of significance: nods, waves, kisses, embraces. We are verbal creatures, to be sure. But we are not only verbal creatures. It is the gnostics, not the Christians, who wish we were.

So: Catholic custom assists us as we come to church. It plucks us by the sleeve with, “Pause. Recollect. Remember where you are and what you are about to do. You come to the Throne, and to the Altar, and to the Supper.”

But there are two further customs traditionally observed by Catholics that also help in this connection. As we move from the doorway, with its holy water stoup, along the aisle to where we will sit, we drop onto our right knee before we take our seat. Again, to a non-Catholic, the movement may look perfunctory. (His opinion in the matter may, alas, have formed itself on the evidence to be drawn from the egregiously perfunctory manner in which many Catholics make the move.)

This is called genuflecting. Most Catholics become so accustomed to genuflecting that the matter sinks into their semiconsciousness. They would have to stop and make a conscious decision if they were to omit it. They would feel vaguely uneasy merely to saunter in and plop into a seat.

But again, this action, so routine, occurs precisely on the frontier between the seen and the unseen, and to miss it, or to look upon it as frivolous, is to fail seriously in discernment.

For what is at stake here is nothing less than my mortal approach to the precincts of the holy. On the surface it is only I—Jane or Bill—getting seated, and it is only this unspectacular building on this random street, and it is 10:57 on the morning of October 5, shall we say. The statistics suggest that what we have at stake is almost nothing at all. Nobody, arriving at no particular church, on no particular day of history. Pure routine. Entirely humdrum.

No. The statistics always miss everything. A drab village in a drab province, on a night like all other nights in a year not to be distinguished from any other year that has dragged on time out of mind in a stable behind an inn not listed in Michelin. Nothing here. Only God being born, and angels singing Gloria.

The eternal does this. It attires itself in the routine, the inauspicious, the anonymous. It does this because it reserves itself (it is so holy) for the pure eye of faith. The little pig eyes that leer at things with concupiscence, the glaring eyes that challenge, or the haughty eyes that annihilate cannot see it. The eye of faith alone can pierce the surface and see Reality.

That is why Catholics genuflect when they come to church. They know that this is a holy place, and to be found on one’s knee is a very good posture in such precincts. It says, ceremonially, not verbally, “I am a creature, and thou art my Creator. I am thy child and thou art my Father. I am a subject and thou art my Sovereign. And, alas, I am a sinner, and thou art holy.” To kneel, only briefly, in this fashion is to order one’s body as well as one’s mind to what is true. A Catholic has difficulty in grasping what it is that non-Catholics espouse that precludes this act. Surely we are not mere minds? Surely all of us bring physical gesture to bear on all situations (a wave, a nod, a kiss). Why is the physical excluded here? Surely to exclude it here and here alone is to imply a gnostic (disembodied), not a Christian (incarnational) state of affairs?

There is also, and preeminently, a particular significance to the act of genuflecting. It is not simply to acknowledge the generally holy. Catholics follow the early Church in taking the Lord’s teaching in the sixth chapter of John altogether soberly. He spoke of immense mysteries there—of the bread that comes down from heaven and of his giving his flesh for the world and of this bread being his flesh. Very difficult matter, not to be approached, much less dismissed, by common sense, or even by gigantic intellectual prowess, least of all by myopic exegesis. The apostolic Church, to a man, understood him to mean that this bread, when it is taken and spoken over as he did in the Upper Room, is (not recalls) his Body. To perceive a miracle here, and not simply a memorial, is to be at one with the ancient Church.[1] To think otherwise is to dissociate oneself from that lineage and to choose a view appearing very late in time.

Because the bread offered in the Mass is, mysteriously (sacramentally), the Body of the Lord, the Church has always treated the consecrated species with the reverence due the Lord if he were present in the flesh. (If? No, since. This is the belief of the Church from the beginning.) Since this is the case, then the Lord may be said to be “there” (again, space and time stagger) on the altar, in the tabernacle, where the consecrated species are kept. It is all, as we have admitted, nonsense to common sense. The mystery that the Church acknowledges, “pinpointed” there in the tabernacle, rebuffs all efforts to come at it with the powers native to us mortals. Science, logic, and magic all stagger here. Only faith assists us across the threshold into the holy place where the Church gathers and kneels, in obedience to the summons.

This brings us to the third action customary among Catholics as they enter the church and prepare themselves to celebrate the sacred mysteries (the other two being, as we have seen, the signing of ourselves with holy water and genuflecting). Visitors will notice that everyone, having found his chair or his place in the pew, thereupon kneels again. The first order of business at this point is not the arranging of one’s purse or coat or greeting one’s acquaintances in the nearby pews. It is to pray.

What else are we mortals to do at such a point? Adam and Eve hid themselves when they heard the voice of the Lord God. Noah built an altar. Abraham did likewise. Isaiah cried out, Woe is me! The shepherds were sore afraid. St. John the Divine on Patmos fell down as one dead. Every one of these exhibited the response proper to us mortals in the presence of the Most High. They all showed that they had been well schooled: this is what you do if you are a true man when the Deity draws near. And in so doing, you show, to all of heaven, earth, and hell, the great dignity with which we men are crowned.

Dignity? Surely such groveling betrays the dread of thralls and helots before a tyrant?

Dread, yes: groveling, no. There is a paradox here. We might speak of a salutary dread, that is, the acute awareness on the part of the creature, sheltered as he is in ordinary circumstances by all that pertains to the familiar, that suddenly immensity has opened out before him. The familiar, the domestic, and the near-at-hand have suddenly fled, as heaven and earth are said to flee away from the presence of the Most High. He finds himself hailed with—with what? How shall we find words for what faith sees? Blinding Glory. Thunderous majesty. Searing purity. Unfiltered light. Such splendor that sapphire itself scarcely suffices to suggest it. If the seraphim cover their faces, what are we to do? What is the protocol in these precincts? How is one to dispose himself?

We, mortals that we are, can only take our cue from the venerable figures of Adam and Abraham and St. John. In them we may see how mortality disposes itself in the presence of the Ever-living One.

And of course what we see is this paradox: somehow the thing that is clearly evinced in the attitudes these figures adopt when they find themselves at the holy place turns out to be, not groveling servitude, but rather the capacity, immensely noble, to recognize and to adore that Glory from which the lesser glory that crowns our own species proceeds. Far from recalling thralls and helots, what we witness here recalls, rather, the noble solemnity apparent when a great prince doffs his coronet and bows before the greater nobility of his sovereign. In that bow, somehow, we see the mark of greatness. It is your popinjay and your cock-o’-the-walk who strut and puff and miss all the cues. St. John: the seraphim: the prince: this is the company among which I would wish, at last, to be found.

No such picture, of course, ordinarily presents itself as we kneel briefly before Mass. Most of the time it is only the very modest business of trying to dragoon one’s thoughts and to achieve some rag of collectedness and focus as we arrive yet again to offer the sacrifice in the presence of the Divine Majesty and to sup at his table.

It is not always easy to know exactly what to say when we kneel to offer a prayer before Mass. In the days when there were all sorts of devotional books full of prayers for every possible juncture in the Catholic’s day, the faithful had at their finger-tips all the prayers anyone could possibly want. Now, when it is widely supposed that people do better to consult their own resources when it comes to prayer, we may find ourselves either casting about for words or offering an Our Father or simply remaining in a kneeling posture for what seems a creditable lapse of time with nothing more occurring in the inner man than, “Hmm. What is one to say at a moment like this? I never have anything very apt to offer. Alas.”

The following prayer, from the Chaldean Liturgy, gives expression to one way of disposing oneself as one approaches the sacred mysteries. On the other hand, it raises a question to which there is no altogether satisfying answer. Here is the prayer:

Before the glorious seat of Thy Majesty, O Lord, and the exalted throne of Thine honor and the awful judgment seat of Thy burning love and the absolving altar which Thy command hath set up, and the place where Thy glory dwelleth, we, Thy people and the sheep of Thy fold, do kneel with thousands of the cherubim singing Alleluia, and many times ten thousand seraphim and archangels acclaiming Thine holiness, worshipping, confessing, and praising Thee at all times, O Lord of All.

The question is, does this language come to us from such a remote distance in time and in sentiment that it is unusable? Nothing in us, we may protest, ever soars to those empyrean arches. We live in a much more humdrum world. We moderns don’t incline toward awful judgment seats and burning love and ten thousand seraphim. That is not our language. I just want God (or, as many Catholics say, “the Man Upstairs”) to know I’m here at Mass. Our Father, who art. . . .

Yes. Such a demurral in the face of that Chaldean acclamation is not to be scoffed at. Those sentiments are very far from being native to us. But, if we press our point here, two considerations might help us to see things in a greater light.

First, ought those remote Chaldean sentiments to remain quite so remote for us? Our forerunners in the faith, for thousands of years, thought of God in such terms: Will we put forward the tiny scrap of time known as the “modern world” by way of dissociating ourselves utterly from such notions? The language would not have seemed odd to our Hebrew fathers in the faith; and our own Christian lineage, from St. John, through St. John Chrysostom, Augustine, Benedict, Bernard, and Francis, has found such expressions to be apt. Surely we cannot suppose that the very small circumference drawn around our own vocabulary and sentiments by “modernity” is a circumference worth defending?

Second, as it happens, we do approach such lofty regions every time we open our mouths at all to pray. “Lord, help me!” Or, “O God, forgive me!” What have we invoked here? Lord? What Lord? Certainly not the local mayor or the governor or the President. Who? Who? It is Jesus, whose name means Savior. The one sought by seers and prophets and wise men, by the blood of Abel crying out from the ground, and by Hagar in her dereliction, and by all widows, orphans, and dispossessed people from the beginning. Lord, help me. Exaudi orationem meam. The cry goes up from every page of history. By framing such a request at all we have at once placed ourselves in that innumerable and immemorial lineage of supplicants who have called upon the name of the Lord.

Or again, perhaps we rattle from time to time, “Hail Mary, full of grace. . . .” Here we sweep back at one stroke the curtain that hangs between the little daily world (Nazareth; late-twentieth-century America) and the eternal. What do we come upon with these words? Angelus Domini nuntiavit Mariae. Heaven has broken through to Nazareth—to us all.

We cannot so much as say one Hail Mary without bringing down the whole of glory onto our heads. Our great task, of course, is so to dispose ourselves, day by day, that we will become increasingly the sort of person who can receive such annunciations from heaven.

The Chaldean acclamation may give us help here. It may hale us out of the dim backwater of the modern world, into the bright regions where Truth dwells. It may alarm us with its language about awful judgment and burning love and thus awaken us from the lethal torpor of self-absorption into which our own epoch has lulled us with its soft crooning of “You have to find yourself. You must be your own person. Look inside yourself.” It may astound us with its seraphim and cherubim; and it will certainly supply us with a vocabulary, long lost to our impoverished argot, that we may bring with us as we venture toward the glorious seat of that Majesty. (Majesty: not a category for us. But is it we or Majesty that is under scrutiny when we point this out?)

So. We kneel for a moment before Mass. The Father who has bidden us here is eager for whatever stuttering we can manage. Lord, help thou mine unbelief. Lord, I am not worthy. Where dwellest thou? Who art thou, Lord? Surely the Lord is in this place. Miserere mei. Our Father. Help me to collect my thoughts here. Help me to forgive that one who makes my life a nightmare. Lord, I never can think of anything very much to say.

The Chaldeans can help us here—or a thousand other ready-made prayers, from old devotional books or from the back cover of the newsprint missalette. Or, if we are the sort from whose heart springs a great rush of spontaneous love and joy and praise, without external helps, so much the better.

But one way or another, by the sign of the Cross, by genuflecting, and by saying a prayer, Catholics make their way ad altare Dei—up to the altar of God, to God who is the joy of our youth, as was said at the beginning of the liturgy for many centuries.

This is very much the picture when Catholics speak of “going to church”. They are not thinking of a meeting primarily—even a meeting for such salutary activities as singing, testifying, enjoying Christian fellowship, or even hearing the Word preached. None of these is the anchor point. The very Word preached at Mass is one with the Word partaken in the sacrament of the altar. It is the Word spoken in Eden, given on Sinai, announced by prophets, incarnate in the womb of the Virgin, crucified, risen, ascended, and given to us, his people, by his promise, until he comes again.

When a Catholic “goes to church”, these are the sacred mysteries among which he finds himself.