I went to Mass recently for the first time in weeks – in the Flesh, so to speak, and feeling much gratitude for our priests, who I know have been suffering without their people in front of them. I got there early and saw that every other pew was blocked off to ensure as much social distancing as possible. I had my mask on.
It’s a bandana, so I resembled an outlaw in a western movie rushing in to rob the bank. I seriously doubt anybody would want to be anywhere near six feet of me. And I get claustrophobic in that mask. I usually treasure anonymity, but not in this case. I feel like a character in a science fiction novel with suspect motivations.
But there I was, mask and all, in church. The altar area of a church is called the sanctuary, and to me that word describes perfectly what church is all about.
From earliest times a sanctuary, from “sanctus,” meaning “holy,” was considered a sacred place, a place of worship, a place where divinity touches humanity. Of course, in the Middle Ages, “sanctuary” also became a state of being, when retreating to a church was a grant of immunity from punishment, a shelter or protection from the ordinary operations of the law, a refuge in the most immediate and literal sense of the word.
Returning to Mass, I felt the sanctity and I felt the refuge. Ours is a sensate religion. I recall the poet William Carlos Williams proclaiming of poetry: “No ideas … but in the things!” So much of what transmits our faith, the “things” of it, engage our senses. I remember once reading a definition of an icon as being “a finger pointing to God.” We walk into a church and see saints are peering down at us from stained glass or gazing out mystically in statue from alabaster or painted eyes. We feel the blessed waters of baptism on our fingers, we are beautifully accosted by incense rising like our prayer. The stations of Christ’s Passion, artfully rendered, literally surround us. Our altars are heavy and stone, secured in the soil of liturgy; the candelabras precious metal; the tabernacle itself the greatest sanctuary in existence, encompassing our Blessed Sacrament, Jesus Himself as transubstantiated from the fruit of the chosen vine and the unleavened bread of those escaping slavery, those on the move from temptation and indulgence seeking obedience and humility and love. We are told the saints and angels are there with us, too, in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. They speak to us in the movement of the Mass. They comfort us in the ancient formulations. And Christ with His head leaning to the side and His wounds visible, hovers over us as we Catholics have a penetrating perception of the strange beauty of the crucifixion, the image of His suffering and dying on His cross.
Participating at Mass as it is telecast is a great opportunity and we are, somehow, sanctified witnesses. But as wonderful as it has been to watch liturgies streamed online throughout our diocese, as Catholics we know something is missing. In that real life sanctuary, in the witness of our fellow attendees, in the presence of saints and angels, as we genuflect and stand and kneel and sit, as we physically approach the paten and chalice, as we taste and see the True Presence of Our Lord and Savior, we come to life as in no other way.
I take refuge in that life – knowing now how much I have taken it for granted, how much I have hungered to be in the sacred space of my church, how I have hungered for the spirit embodied in liturgical action and the people experiencing it with me, and how I appreciate the generosity of the ordained playing their unique roles in the sacred choreography of heaven come to earth.
We return in gratitude and relief and greater appreciation to the refuge that is the sanctuary of our churches. Our fellow parishioners await us. Our priests and deacons and altar servers await us. Once there, we await an usher to signal us to rise from the pew and come up to meet Christ, to consume Him, to love Him more, to take Him into the precious sanctuary of our souls.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.