The priest lifts the host above his head and the bells ring and the church goes silent and for 4 seconds the body of Christ is held up before the eyes of every soul in that building.
4 seconds.
And in those 4 seconds most of the people in the pews are not looking at the host.
They are looking at a book or at the person beside them or they have their eyes closed.
I have watched this for years from the altar and I want to tell you tonight what I have come to understand about those 4 seconds and about the one thing that keeps souls from seeing what is being held up in front of them.
Because it is not distraction and it is not laziness.
The souls who miss it most are often the most devout souls in the church and they are missing it for a reason they have never been told.
Let me begin with what is actually happening in those 4 seconds because if you do not understand what the church is doing then everything I say afterward will sound like a preference and it is not a preference.
The mass has a moment at which the priest standing at the altar takes bread into his hands and speaks words over it that no man has the right to speak.
He says, “This is my body”.
And then he takes the chalice and says, “This is the chalice of my blood”.
And at the words by the power of the Holy Spirit the substance of the bread is changed into the body of Christ and the substance of the wine is changed into the blood of Christ.
Not symbolically.
Not spiritually in the sense of a nice thought.
Really, the thing on the altar becomes God.
And then the priest does something that the church has done since the earliest centuries and that you have seen a thousand times.
He lifts it up.
He raises the host above his head so that it can be seen and then he lifts the chalice.
That lifting is called the elevation.
I want you to understand why it exists.
It exists because the church wants you to look at it.
That is the whole reason.
It is not for the priest.
The priest has already adored.
He is not lifting it for his own benefit.
He is lifting it because the Lord said, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people to myself”.
And the church, in obedience to that word, lifts him up and holds him there and rings a bell and says to the whole congregation, without words, “Look”.
And the reason this matters so much is that the whole of the Christian faith rests on a thing being seen.
Saint John began his first letter with a sentence that should stop us because he is not describing a philosophy or a doctrine or an idea.
He is describing an event.
He says, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands concerning the word of life”.
Heard, seen, looked upon, touched.
Four physical verbs in the first sentence of the letter because the Apostle knew that the faith is not a message about God, it is God appearing.
And in the Gospel of John chapter 1 verse 29, John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him and says, “Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world”.
Behold.
He does not say consider.
He does not say reflect on.
He says, “Look, there he is.
Look at him”.
And in the Gospel of Luke chapter 2 verse 30, an old man named Simeon holding a baby in his arms in the temple says, “For my eyes have seen your salvation”.
Your eyes, not your heart.
Your eyes.
And in the Gospel of John chapter 20 verse 28, the Apostle Thomas who had refused to believe is standing in front of the risen Christ and he sees the wounds and he says, “My Lord and my God”.
And he said it because he looked.
That is the pattern.
God became visible.
He took a face and a body and hands that could be touched.
And the church who has never forgotten that has built the whole of her liturgy around the principle that the things of God are not only to be believed but to be seen.
And that is why the elevation exists.
Not to give the priest a moment of private devotion, to give you a moment of sight.
Now, in that moment there are three things that most Catholics do and all three of them are ways of not seeing.
I want to name them tonight.
And I want to say at the start that none of them is a sin.
Not one.
The church does not bind any of this under pain of sin.
And if you have done all three for 60 years, you have not broken a commandment and God is not holding it against you.
What I am doing is not correcting you.
I am offering you something you have been missing.
The first thing to stop doing when the priest elevates the host is looking down at your missal.
Now, I want to be careful here because I love the missal.
The missal is one of the great gifts of the church to the faithful in the modern age and I have watched souls come alive in the mass because they could finally understand what was being said.
The Second Vatican Council wanted the faithful to participate fully, consciously, and actively in the missal is one of the ways that happened.
If you have a missal, keep it.
Use it.
Read it.
But there is a difference between following the mass and watching the mass.
And the elevation is the moment when the church asks you to stop following and start watching.
Think about what the missal is.
It is a book that tells you what is happening at the altar.
It is a description.
It is a map.
And a map is a wonderful thing until you are standing in front of the country it describes.
When the priest lifts the host, the thing the missal describes is in the room.
It is not a description anymore.
It is not a text.
It is the body of Christ held up 4 ft away from the first row.
And you are reading a page that says, “The priest genuflects, adores, and rises, and shows the host to the people”.
Why would you read about it? It is right there.
I want to give you a comparison.
Imagine you were in the crowd on the day of the resurrection, and the apostles had written an account of what they saw, and someone handed you a copy as it was happening, and you spent the moment reading it.
That would be absurd.
And that is exactly what happens in churches every Sunday in a thousand buildings all over the world, and nobody means to do it, and it is not a sin, and it is a loss.
And here is the deeper thing.
The missal is a human book.
It is good, and it is helpful, and it is not the word made flesh.
And when you look up at the host, you are not looking at a page about God.
You are looking at God.
That difference should be obvious, and somehow it is not because we have all done it for so long that we have stopped not noticing.
Now, the second thing to stop doing when the priest elevates the host is whispering.
And I want to be very precise about what I mean because I am not talking about a mother quietly telling her toddler to sit down.
That is not a distraction.
That is a mother doing the work of the domestic church in the pew, and God bless her for it.
I am talking about the ordinary chatter that has become normal in our churches.
The comment to the person beside you, the question about lunch, the remark about the traffic, the conversation that begins during the sign of peace and does not end until the final blessing.
And I want to tell you why this matters at the elevation specifically.
And I want to give you the scripture because this is not a matter of etiquette.
The prophet Habakkuk chapter 2 verse 20.
But the Lord is in his holy temple.
Let all the earth keep silence before him.
That is a command.
Not a suggestion about being polite.
The Lord is in his holy temple.
And the response to that fact is silence.
And the prophet Zephaniah chapter 1 verse 7, be silent before the Lord God for the day of the Lord is near.
The church has always understood that silence is not the absence of something.
It is the presence of attention.
It is what a soul does when it knows that something enormous is happening.
And the canon of the mass, the great prayer of consecration, is the most solemn silence in the world.
Because at that moment the whole church on earth and in purgatory and in heaven is present at an offering.
Think about who is present at the elevation.
Not just the people in the building.
The angels are present.
The saints are present.
The blessed mother is present.
The whole communion of heaven has gathered around that altar.
And the son is being offered to the father.
And the people of God are standing in the middle of it.
And someone in the third row is talking about lunch.
And I want to say something to the soul who is now feeling accused.
because I know that some of you have talked in church and I know that some of you are remembering it right now and I want you to hear me.
You have not committed a grave sin.
You have not destroyed anything.
You have not been disrespectful in your heart and God is not angry with you.
You were probably talking to your grandchild or greeting a friend you have not seen in a month or whispering something about the sermon, but I want you to understand what is happening.
Because I think that if you understood it you would stop and you would not stop out of guilt.
You would stop out of awe.
The one thing I will ask of you if someone near you is talking is this, do not glare.
Do not shush them.
Do not turn around and give them a look that they will remember for a month.
Pray for them and then be the one who is silent because a soul that is silent in that moment is a witness and a soul that glares is a distraction.
And for the parents who are wondering whether this applies to your children, hear me.
No.
It does not.
A child who is loud at mass is a child who is at mass and that is a victory and I will defend you on that in front of anybody.
What I am talking about is the adult conversation.
Your child’s noise is a prayer.
Your adult conversation is a different thing.
Now, the third thing to stop doing when the priest elevates the host and this is the one I want to spend the most time on because it is the one that is least obvious and the one that the most devout souls do.
The third thing is this.
Do not close your eyes.
I want you to hear that as a sentence without any build-up because it is important and because I know it will sound wrong to some of you.
Do not close your eyes at the elevation.
And I want to explain why because there is a real tradition in the church of closing your eyes to pray and it is not a bad tradition and it is not what I am condemning.
The contemplative tradition teaches that the soul should withdraw from the senses and go inward.
That is real.
Saint John of the Cross, Saint Teresa of Avila, the whole mystical tradition, all of it teaches that there are stages of prayer in which the soul is drawn beyond images and words and the senses and into a darkness that is not an absence, but a presence.
That is real and it is good and I would never tell a soul to abandon it, but the elevation is not the moment for that.
And here is why because the elevation is not a moment of interior prayer.
It is a moment of its external sight.
The church is doing something with a physical body in a physical building and she is lifting that body up in front of your physical eyes and she is asking you to look at it with your eyes.
And if you close your eyes at that moment you are not entering into the prayer of the church.
You are entering into your own at the very moment when the church has arranged everything so that you can see.
Think about what the incarnation actually means.
God did not become a thought.
He became flesh.
He took a face and a name and a body with a mother and hands that could be held and feet that could be washed.
The whole of the Christian faith rests on the fact that God made himself visible and that the apostles did not simply believe in him, they saw him.
And St.
John, who saw him, wrote in his first letter, chapter 1, verse 1, that which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands.
He is insisting on it.
He is saying, “Do not turn this into a philosophy.
We saw him.
We touched him”.
And St.
Thomas, who doubted, was given what he needed in order to believe, and what he was given was sight.
Our Lord did not give him an argument.
He gave him his hands.
And Thomas looked and said, “My Lord and my God”.
And the church in the elevation is doing the same thing.
She is saying, “Here he is.
Look”.
Now, I want to tell you who does this the most.
And I want to say it carefully because I have been on both sides of it and because I have enormous affection for the souls I am about to describe.
The souls who close their eyes at the elevation are usually the most devout souls in the church.
They are the ones who take the mass seriously.
They are the ones who have been taught to pray, who have read the books, who have been on the retreats, who have learned the practice of adoration, who know that the Lord is present and who want to be present to him.
And somewhere along the way, they were taught that the most reverent thing a soul can do in front of the Blessed Sacrament is to close its eyes and adore in the silence of its own heart.
And I want to say to those souls gently and with everything in me, “You are not wrong about the adoration.
You are right about the adoration.
You are only wrong about the eyes.
Because our Lord did not give you eyes so that you would close them when he held himself up in front of you”.
He gave you eyes so that you could see him.
And the church did not arrange this moment so that you could go inward.
She arranged it so that you could look.
There is a whole theology of this in the Eastern Church.
And I want to mention it because it is one of the treasures of the church that the West has largely forgotten.
The Eastern Christians have always insisted that the incarnation makes images possible.
Because God became visible, he can be depicted.
Because he took a face, a face can be painted.
And the icon is not idolatry as some have claimed.
It is a confession that the word became flesh.
And the central act of the Eastern liturgy is the same act as the elevation.
The lifting up of the holy gifts so that the people can see.
The church wants you to see.
And the reason is not that sight is more important than faith.
The reason is that faith comes through it.
St.
Paul wrote in the letter to the Romans chapter 10 verse 17 that faith comes from hearing.
And St.
John wrote in his first letter that what he saw with his eyes was what he proclaimed.
The faith comes to us through the senses.
And the elevation is the moment when the church gives the Lord to your eyes.
Now, I want to be very careful here because I know that some of you have a circumstance that means what I am saying cannot be applied in the way I am saying it.
If you are blind, you are not excluded from anything I am saying.
If you have a condition that makes it difficult to look, you are not excluded.
If you cannot see the altar from where you are sitting, you are not excluded.
If you are ill and cannot keep your eyes open, you are not excluded.
God sees the heart.
And the Lord is present to the soul that loves him whether its eyes are working or not.
What I am speaking to is the soul who can look and who is not looking and who has been told that not looking is the more reverent thing.
It is not.
The more reverent thing is to look.
Now, let me bring these three together because there is a pattern in them and it is not the pattern you might expect.
The book, the whisper, and the closed eyes are not three different problems.
They are three ways of being somewhere else in the one moment when the church is asking you to be here.
The book takes your eyes and puts them on a description instead of is thing.
The whisper takes your attention and puts it on the person beside you instead of the Lord in front of you.
And the closed eyes take your whole self and put it inside your own interior at the exact moment when the Lord has come outside of himself, so to speak, and made himself visible in the hands of a man.
All three are ways of missing the same moment.
And the moment is 4 seconds long.
Now, I want you to hear what I am not saying, and I want to be very clear.
Because there is a real danger in a message like this, and I will not let it happen.
I am not saying that you will be saved by looking at the host or lost by not looking.
That is not the faith.
The faith is that Christ died for you, and that he gives himself to you in the sacrament, and that a soul in a state of grace receives him whether it was looking at the right moment or not.
Your salvation does not depend on the quality of your attention.
It depends on the blood of Jesus Christ.
I am not saying that closing your eyes in prayer is wrong.
It is not.
It is good, and it is ancient, and there are moments in the mass when it is the right thing to do.
The silence after communion, for instance, is a moment for going inward.
That is what it is for.
I am not saying that a soul who reads the missal at the elevation is committing a sin.
There is no sin here.
There is no commandment.
There is no rule in the rubrics that says the congregation must look up.
What there is is the whole instinct of the church expressed in the architecture and in the bells and in the lifting up of the host and in the words of Simeon and Thomas and John the Baptist.
And that instinct is look, and I am not saying that this is a new thing or a discovery or something I have invented.
This is the oldest instinct in the church.
It is the instinct of the woman who touched the hem of his garment and the apostles who ran to the empty tomb and looked in and the crowd who followed him into the desert because they wanted to see what he would do next.
It is the instinct of a soul that knows that the word became flesh and that the flesh is still here and that it is lifted up for the life of the world.
Now, let me tell you what this does over a lifetime.
I want you to think about a soul who has looked at the host at the elevation every Sunday for 50 years.
Not perfectly.
Not with great devotion every time.
Sometimes tired, sometimes distracted, sometimes thinking about the parking lot.
But every Sunday at the bells, looking up that soul has stood in front of the body of Christ consciously and physically 2,600 times.
And each time something has been happening that the soul could not measure and could not feel because grace does not only enter through the mind, it enters through the whole person.
And a soul that has placed itself week after week, year after year in the place where the Lord is lifted up has been formed by that.
It has been shaped.
Its vision of the world has been changed.
And here is what I have noticed in the souls I have known who did this.
They are not the most articulate Catholics.
They are not the ones who can explain the theology.
But they are the ones who have a certain steadiness in the face of suffering.
And I think it is because they have seen the Lord over and over.
And they know that he is real.
And they know that the world that is seen is not the only world that is.
And I want to tell you on the other side what I have seen in the souls who did not.
The Catholic who went to mass every Sunday for 50 years and never once looked at the host and who is now in their 80s and is not sure whether any of it is true and who wonders if God is real and who has been to a thousand masses and cannot remember a single one.
I am not saying that is a judgment on them.
I am not saying that God has abandoned them.
I am not saying that their faith was not real.
I am saying that there is a way of attending mass for a lifetime and never entering into it.
And the church in her wisdom has built the elevation so that a soul does not have to do that.
And there is one more thing I want to say about the four seconds.
And it is this, that moment is what you were made for.
Not the elevation itself, the thing it shows.
The Lord lifted up in the middle of the people, seen and adored.
That is what heaven is.
That is what the whole of the Christian life is moving toward.
St.
John in his first letter chapter 3 verse 2 says we are God’s children now and what we will be has not yet appeared but we know that when he appears we shall be like him because we shall see him as he is.
See him as he is.
That is the destination, the vision of God and every elevation is a rehearsal for it.
4 seconds of what eternity is going to be.
And so the question I want to leave with you is not a question about etiquette.
It is this.
Are you in training for the vision of God or are you out of practice? Let me give you the practical thing and I want it to be one thing because I do not want to give you six steps and have you forget all of them.
This Sunday when the bells ring at the elevation, look at the host and when you are looking at it, say what Thomas said.
Say it quietly in your heart or on your lips if you can.
My Lord and my God.
That is all.
You do not need a long prayer.
You do not need an act of adoration composed by a saint.
You do not need to feel anything.
You need to look at him and say what Thomas said and then be quiet.
And if you forget, if the bells ring and you are looking at the book and you look up and it is gone, do not carry a scruple about it.
God is not grading you.
Look at the chalice.
Look at him next Sunday.
The Lord is in no hurry and if you have children, teach them.
Whisper it to them at the elevation.
Look at Jesus.
Not a lecture.
Three words.
And do it again the next week.
Your children will remember those three words for the rest of their lives.
And if you are a soul who has closed your eyes at the elevation for 50 years and you are afraid that you have been doing it wrong, hear me.
You have not been doing it wrong.
You have been doing a good thing at the wrong moment and the Lord, who sees your heart, has been receiving your adoration all along.
Just open your eyes this Sunday.
That is the whole of what I am asking.
And if you are a soul who reads the missal because you find it hard to follow and you are afraid I am telling you to put it down, I am not.
Keep the missal.
Read the texts.
Love the liturgy of the word, but at the elevation when the bells ring, look up.
The missal has told you what is happening.
Now, look at the thing it was telling you about.
Let me pray with you.
Father in heaven, we come before you as children who have have stood in front of the greatest mystery of our faith a thousand times and have not seen it.
We have read about it and we have talked through it and we have closed our eyes to it and we have walked past it.
Open our eyes, Lord.
Give us the sight of Thomas, who saw and believed.
Give us the sight of Simeon, who held the infant and said, “My eyes have seen your salvation”.
Give us the sight of John, who saw the word made flesh and testified that he had looked upon him with his own eyes.
And give us the eyes of faith, which see what the eyes of the body cannot see and which look upon the Lord in the sacrament and say, “My Lord and my God”.
Through Christ our Lord.
Amen.
Now, before you go, three things.
First, type in the comments below these words, “My Lord and my God”.
Type them now and let them be what you say this Sunday at the elevation.
Second, if you want me to go deeper on anything I have said tonight on the theology of the elevation, on what the church actually teaches about the real presence, on the difference between contemplative prayer and liturgical prayer, on how to explain the mass to your children, write it in the comments.
I will build whole messages on the questions that come back again and again.
I am not guessing at what you need.
I want to hear from you.
Third, share this with somebody you love.
Share it with a soul who has been going to mass for 50 years and has never been told what the elevation is for.
Share it with the devout soul who closes their eyes at the elevation and thinks that is the reverent thing to do.
Share it with your children who will learn from you whether to look.
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May he make his face shine upon you and be gracious to you.
May he lift up his countenance upon you and give you peace.
May the angels of God encamp around your home and around your family and around the church where you receive.
And may the most blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of God, who held the son of God in her arms and looked upon his face, spread her mantle over you and over every soul you love.
Uh and this Sunday when the bells ring, look up in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.
Amen.
