Last week we began a series of homilies about the Holy Mass, and for the next few weeks we’ll be focusing in on some specific elements of Mass in order to enrich our experience of what goes on here every single weekend, every single day in fact.  If you weren’t here last weekend, I introduced this idea with a beautiful phrase from the words of St. John Vianney: that if we knew, even for an instant, what was really going on at Mass, we would die of joy.  And so we’re taking a few weeks to delve deeply into what it is that we are actually doing here, and why.  Last week we talked about the Mass as sacrifice: what we experience here is Christ’s perfect sacrifice offered for us on the cross, mystically brought through space and time for us to adore and to welcome into our hearts.  Basically we talked about what God is doing at Mass.  Today we’ll talk about what we do.  

We’ve all heard the standard excuse about why people don’t come to church: “I just don’t get anything out of it.”  We’ve probably all had those thoughts at times; I know I have.  But that’s actually the wrong way to think about what we’re doing here: we’re not here to be consumers of an experience.  We should get an awful lot out of coming to Mass, absolutely.  But that’s not actually the point.  We don’t primarily come here to get something: we come here primarily to give something. To give something to God.  We come here first and foremost to worship, to adore him.  And you know, it all boils down to whether God is real or not.  If he’s just some kind of social construct or a common delusion that we all participate in to make ourselves feel better: then this really is only about behavior modification and self-help coaching, and you shouldn’t come if you don’t find it helpful.  But if God is actually real: if he has existed from all time, if he created the world from nothing out of love, if he is Lord of heaven and earth, if he is our savior and our king, if he is the one that gives our lives real purpose and meaning: that demands something of us.  

If all that is true, then our relationship with God is our fundamental relationship, the relationship that makes all of our other relationships possible or make any sense at all.  And we have to constantly be reminded of that, and acknowledge who God truly is in our lives, to keep everything in balance and in order.  How do we do that?  Worship.  If he is who he says he is: then our only response can be to worship him.  Regular, reverent adoration.  And so we do, using the most perfect prayer of worship that we have, which is the prayer that God himself left us through the Church, the Holy Mass.  This is connected to what we talked about last week: Christ’s sacrifice, which is what we experience at Mass, is the greatest act of worship ever.  Our Lord gave his Father everything.  And we attach ourselves to that act of worship.  We worship the Father through Christ, through his sacrifice.  And just being here is already a pretty meaningful act of worship.  Don’t forget that: you’re sacrificing your time and your comfort, the inconvenience of getting here, and maybe your preference to be doing something else on a {Saturday evening/ Sunday morning}.  That’s already an act of worship on your part.  And then you can offer him your attention, your own prayers and personal needs and intentions that you’ve brought with you.  This becomes real in the second half of Mass when the focus shifts to the altar.  The gifts of bread and wine are brought up to the altar from the congregation: that’s a powerful moment: when that happens, you can send up, along with the bread and wine, your own joys and sufferings, your own needs and intentions, your own pains and sorrows, and you can send up your love of God and your desire to worship him.  And then, all those things that you unite in your mind and your heart to the bread and wine: your own acts of sacrifice and worship, are also blessed, consecrated, and offered to God in the perfect act of worship.  

At Mass we can worship and pray in the very same action: by uniting ourselves and our lives and our prayers and concerns to the offering of the Mass itself.  And then, something beautiful happens: when we focus that way: when we really try to adore God, and offer him everything we have in our hearts, that’s when the Mass transforms us.  That’s when we finally get something out of it, something real and lasting.  We get something we can’t get anywhere else or any other way.  When we worship God in spirit and in truth in the perfect prayer of Christ’s sacrifice at Mass, that makes us holier, more virtuous, more peaceful at heart, more stable, more prepared for life’s many challenges.  It’s not an emotional thing, although our emotions might be very stirred at times.  But it’s deeper than that: it’s a profoundly spiritual and personal thing: when we worship, when we pray, every Sunday: we re-align our priorities; we put our first relationship first.  Putting God where he belongs in our life, everything else falls into place.  So to sum up what happens at Mass: he sacrifices; we worship, and we unite our prayers and sacrifices to his.  And by worshipping his sacrifice, our wounded hearts are made whole.