Alpha & Omega

For me, it all begins with the mass. The sacrifice of the mass, as Catholics habitually called it for centuries.

All other disputes were secondary to this one: whether Christ is offerred to his Father at each mass in a sacrifice, so that his action in assuming the whole weight of human evil & enduring the separation from God & overcoming it is perpetuated by the priest, or whether it's the community's action of praise & thanks where Christ present, not on the altar as the Victim & Offering, but in some other way.

The first is a supernatural, transcendent action, one that declares a temporal event actually enters, encompasses, and surpasses Time, and that this is a divine action, in which the Creator assumes the entirety of all the evils issuing from the Fall of all mankind.

Get rid of that, and bit by bit, shred by shred, word by word, interpretation by reinterpretation, the transcendent vanishes in favor of a 'spiritual' naturalism. When people talk of 'spirituality' today, they're talking about sensuality in theological terminology.

The great disaster for the Catholic Church was in the attempt to bridge the absolute gap between church services which are divine pep rallies intended to inspire people to reverence or to enthusiasm, and between the one in which a God opens his wounds & feeds the communicant his own eternal substance under an appearance of unleavened bread. Anything aside from this, no matter how reverent, or no matter how exalting, is mundane & even profane.

The mystery of faith, contrary to the acclamation in the laicized mass used in the vast majority of Catholic churches today, is not 'Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again,' but the complete unity & identity of the priest's sacrifice at the altar with Christ's own sacrifice, the long offering of Christ's own life culminating with Calvary & the Resurrection.

Why is this the beginning and the end, the alpha & the omega? Our life, in itself, crumbles beneath its own weight. We can't make it rise, even when we make it elaborate, amazing, energetic, even when we accomplish great things. The very attempt to take on ourselves "the mystery of things" (Shakespeare) is an impossible imitation of Christ. We didn't call the universe into being: even the small fragments of time & space & desire & imagination that fall to us drive us to break them, and ourselves, in the using.