Lenten reflection: Ite missa est (8)

Note: All other posting will cease until Easter. Have a good and holy one.

Way back in the beginning I said that the word "mass" derives from "Ite missa est", missa meaning sent.

As does the word "missal" although missals are not intended to be thrown. A long time ago one was thrown at the Cathedral in Saint John, New Brunswick. It happened during Tenebrae, which means darkness, and is celebrated during Holy Week. The one I am familiar with took place on Holy Thursday. In the older rite, there was a moment in Tenebrae when all the lights in the church were extinguished and then, in the darkness, the Bishop, the attending priests and the altar boys in the sanctuary would rustle the pages of their missals and shuffle their feet.

The altar boys at the Cathedral used to sit on rows of pews on opposite sides of the altar. A plan was hatched that one of the boys would throw a missal across to the other side in the darkness. These altar boys assumed that the dark and the other sounds would mask the desecration they were planning. An athletic young lad was selected for the job because he was famous both for the strength and the accuracy of his throwing. He was not, unfortunately, known for his intelligence and he misunderstood the meaning of the phrase "the other pews". When the moment came, he stood and with all the power he was famous for, hurled his missal out into the darkness where the congregation sat.

That this athletic young man could be relied upon was not the only incorrect assumption the altar boys made. It also turned out to be the case that the hurled prayer book made more noise than the combined efforts of those in the sanctuary. It made enough noise that everyone stopped and listened to the sound of that missal hurtling through the air. The thrower had given it lots of height and it traveled in a high trajectory. The altar boys listened with a sense of foreboding doom. And then it hit. That impact was followed by a blood-curdling scream and a long fit of uncontrollable crying from the poor woman it hit.

The reason those on the altar would make all the noise by shuffling and rustling the first place was to symbolize the chaos of a world without God. A chaos the sixteen altar boys present that night got a profound and lasting impression of. For the next while that is where we will live. And our prayer is, "Please be".