On the Feast of The Transfiguration of our Lord

'I do not exist without this'

There's a thread, a fine ball of

spider's web

buried

deep within the dark whorls

of me.

Summonsed on the sweet balm of incense

Adjured by Bach in the fourth

Transfixed,

dancing,

re-turned, up

unto thee.

OK, so forgive the pithy poetry. I'm (ineptly) trying to describe how lost, how absolutely annihilated, my over-achieving Type A self gets when I attend Latin Mass. I'm not talking uprooted, I'm talking shredded, as though I could take everything I have worked for, sought, kept and discarded in my life and fling it off, far from my very being. The Florence Farr quote comes to mind:

'I stood naked in a bleak and dark eternity, and clothed it in my exaltation.'

Standing anywhere naked is probably precisely the last thing that I should be inspired to do at the cessation of an ultra-conservative Tridentine liturgy, but I've never been one for walking the well defined, amply lit, path. So, anyways.

What is going on here?

There are some easily identifiable draw cards - a rite that speaks to mindfulness, memory of the departed, and a call and response to the soul and the spirit of the Other - not just 'peace be with you', but 'peace be with your spirit'. There's the priest's communion where he (yeah, he) asks 'What return shall I make to the Lord?' a space where inner dialogue is modelled, and accomplished.

There is actual time taken with Gregorian chant, where one word may wander all over the octave, the Latin language where one word may do for five English ones. There's aliteration, a close personal favourite - 'Dominus Deus', 'Saecula saeculorum', 'Spiritum sanctum', 'dilexi decorum domus tuae'.

Perhaps my response is partly the rebellious me - I feel that there is something in the post-modern demand to be 'present in the Now' which seems to mean that we have greater tendency to completely overlook our intergenerational presence. We exist 'saecula saeculorum'. World without end. The power of connecting me to my ancestry through Latin Mass lies precisely with the future that the relationship demands that I face, 'world without end'. There have been moments in the last eighteen months where I have sensed absolute excavation of all of the usual 'fronts' that I dress my human self up with, each day a different character, via my presence in these services. A sort of stripping of my non-essential elements to remind me precisely of my purpose, here on our merry little planet. Which is to take care of what is here, unto the ages of ages. World without end.

Transfigured. Somewhere between Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophet, the Dead and the Living, somewhere there, our Christ selves, clothed in white, speak to us through the message of an Angel, the wings of our thoughts.

Spirit descends upon us, but our soul is what makes us arise, always and everywhere, there, but really, here.