Each month, I offer a thought on the Sunday Mass experience in a series entitled Mass Communication.

The assembly gathers on Sunday for the Eucharist. We gather to celebrate a mystery.

A mystery is something complicated, difficult, or challenging to explain. In the literary world, a mystery is a novel, play, or movie that focuses on a complicated plot.

In the Catholic imagination, a mystery is something contrary to these ideas. Celebrating mystery is when we bump into something concrete that opens our senses to God. Four concrete things in the liturgy connect us to God: the presider’s chair, the altar, and the tabernacle. We come into God’s presence when we come in contact with these things. Furthermore, God is also present in the gathered assembly, the preaching, and the hospitality of the people. These are examples of how we come into contact with God using all our senses.

The liturgy begins with the assembly standing, raising all their voices to be one voice in song – the Body of Jesus, crucified and risen, praises the Father in the Holy Spirit through music. The Gathering Song is important because it “expresses the unity of the faith of the assembly in its various parts, many voices together make one beautiful sound, a poly-phony, a sym-phony … This is the voice of the Church” (Driscoll 17)! As the assembly sings, torches, incense, and the Book of the Gospels enter the holy space. The Book of the Gospels is the Word of God, and we treat it with the same reverence and devotion as we do in the Eucharist because the Word speaks at liturgy!

As incense marks the altar for worship, we start by tracing the primary mystery of our faith onto our bodies in a simple prayer known as the Sign of the Cross. We trace the life of Christ, his passion and resurrection, the entire paschal mystery, and all its meaning to our bodies. This Sign of the Cross “makes its force felt on our bodies. The body that was crucified on the cross touches my body and shapes it now for what is about to happen … Our own bodies will be drawn into the body that hung on the cross, and this sharing in the death of Christ is the revelation of the trinitarian mystery” (Driscoll 21).

It is fitting that the Sign of the Cross begins the Mass. In this Sign, we recall that God has one name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In this Sign, we recall our baptism. The Sign brings Christian Baptism to its whole pitch (Driscoll 22). The Sign of the Cross grafts us into the life of Christ, and his Mass has begun.