Meditations Before Mass
by Romano Guardini

XV. The Word of Praise

WE DISCUSSED first the revelatory word found chiefly in Epistle and Gospel, as well as in the sermon; then the executory word which fulfills the Lord's command in the Consecration. There remains the word of prayer. For the most part its nature is obvious, yet there are a few important points which should be made.

Prayer appears in Holy Mass primarily in the impressive form of praise or hymn. Such is the greater doxology or chant of honor, often called the Gloria after its opening word. It begins with the praise of the angels over Bethlehem (Luke 2: 14), continues with expressions lauding God's glory, then shifts to a kind of litany in which the all-holy Persons of the divine Trinity, above all Christ, are supplicated, and ends with the solemn naming of the threefold God.

The part of the Mass known as the Preface is also praise. This introduces the most important prayer of the Mass, the Canon, which includes the Consecration. Indicative of the solemnity of the Preface are its introductory sentences with which priest and people alternately stimulate and strengthen each other's spiritual exaltation. The hymn proper then begins with homage to the Father in heaven, homage based each time on the particular mystery of the feast that is being celebrated. After joining in the glorious praises of the angel-choirs, it terminates with the adoration of the Sanctus. The first part of this prayer is taken from the vision of the prophet, Isaias, who heard it from the lips of the cherubim (Isaias 6: 3); the second is from the Gospel passage describing Jesus' entry into Jerusalem, where the exulting children shouted the words to Him in the streets (Matt. 21:9).

On certain feastdays we find further praises, called Sequences, tucked between Epistle and Gospel. They are hymnal proclamations of the feast's central event, through which they appeal to God. Sequences are to be found mainly in the Masses of Easter, Pentecost and Corpus Christi.

Sometimes praise, common also in the Graduals, breaks into certain forms of the Introit, Offertory and Collects (prayers briefly interspersed with alleluja's) which are entwined about Epistle and Gospel.

These praises continue the themes of the psalms and songs of praise in the Old and New Testaments: inspired man, brimming with the experience of God's grandeur, glory and awfulness, with His love and His fervor, proclaims God's omnipotence, admiring, lauding, worshipping Him. The praisegiver lives in this glory as in a special atmosphere in which he delights. The motives for praise vary, but all praise has one thing in common: spiritual exaltation, the glow of divine glory. In praise man's prayer is farthest removed from the everyday world. This sense of the heights is particularly apparent in the prelude to the Preface, in which priest and congregation help each other to leave everything low and mean behind them, and to ascend. First they wish each other God's strength: "The Lord be with you," prays the priest, to which the people reply: "And with thy spirit." God is asked to move and fortify His people, to accompany the spirit of His priest. And "spirit" here is not intellect, but that simultaneous intimacy and exaltation from which the movements of love, adoration, and enthusiasm climb. Then the priest calls: "Lift up your hearts." The congregation responds: "We have lifted them up unto the Lord." To this comes the new summons: "Let us give thanks to the Lord our God." Response: "It is meet and just." Linked to the last word is the Preface itself: "It is truly meet and just, right and availing unto salvation, that we should at all times and in all places give thanks unto Thee, O holy Lord, Father almighty and everlasting God."

In these lines something peculiar to the prayer of praise is particularly apparent: thanksgiving. It is a rendering of thanks not for some beautiful or useful gift, but for the whole of blessed existence. It is man's response to the glory of God unveiled by revelation, man's response to His "Epiphany."

Man thanks his Creator for everything, for everything is His gift: natural life the gift of creation; supernatural life, that of salvation. Such thanksgiving is the attitude farthest removed from narrowness and selfishness; it is the wide flowering of the heart, the love which embraces the whole breadth of existence, the superabundance of truth. In the Gloria it finds its most beautiful expression: "Gratias agimus tibi propter magnam gloriam tuam." "Gratias agere" means to thank, honor, "wish well". Greeks and Romans particularly praised the virtue of magnanimity, the free nobility of being. This attitude appears here in relation to God: "We give thee thanks for Thy great glory." Even in human relationships the feeling exists: "I thank you, not for what you have done for me or for what you think of me, but for yourself, for existing." Here love reaches a mysterious greatness. Actually, thanks for the existence of a loved one should be directed elsewhere: to his parents or to God. What seems folly albeit beautiful folly is, when applied to God, pure sense, for He exists of Himself. He is the "I am" (Exod. 3:14). Of all existences, His alone has "merit," for it is the perfect expression of His love. For this love, man, shaken by God's glory, thanks Him.

Deep emotion streams through the songs of praise, emotion different from that of personal experience. Its bearer is not the individual, but the whole, the Church. The Church is more than the sum of her believers, more than the huge ordo which enfolds them all. Saints Paul and John tell us what she is: a mighty organism, humanity reborn in the Mystical Body of Christ, in which the individual believers are the pulsing "cells." It is then the Church who speaks in her great hymns.

One might even venture to say that the joy they voice is not hers alone, but is shared by God Himself. Doesn't St. Paul say that the Holy Spirit Himself pleads for us "with unutterable groanings" (Rom. 8:26)? If this is true of all prayer, then certainly of the prayer of praise. The psalms of the Old Testament stream from prophetic enthusiasm; those of the New from the fire of Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles and the First Epistle to the Corinthians testify to the power of that streaming and storming of the Spirit so powerful that it shattered the order of thought and speech, so that only a stammering and exclaiming could be recognized. The same Paul, however, admonishes men to restrain such outbursts. Higher than storm and stammer sings the clear word controlled by truth and inner discipline, and the faithful should channel their enthusiasm into "spiritual songs" (1 Cor. 12; Eph. 5:19). From these spring the hymns of the church. The joy and elation of the spirit which the Father sends us in Christ's name break through and return to the Father. This sense of sacred mounting beats like wings through the hymn sung at the consecration of the paschal candle on Easter Saturday, the "Exultet," but it is also perceptible in the Gloria and in other songs of praise.

The word of revelation demands of us composed listening and pious absorption; the executory word of the Consecration, our reverent presence and participation. The word of praise asks to become our own, that we give it our best or rather ourselves that we let it sweep us along with it, teaching us what real prayer is that we may outgrow the narrowness and pettiness of self.

We can only repeat: It would be a good preparation for Holy Mass to go over the Gloria or a Gradual or Preface the day before, or before the service begins, to enable these to come alive for us and to allow us to recognize and practice the exaltation that each contains.