Mediation… and you

JMJ
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At the end of Messiah Handel composed a four minute long Amen that fugues its way through some classic baroque forms and progression ending, finally, with five very firm Amens presented as 3 and 2, with a break of four beats in total silence between them. Listening to the entire piece, it seems that silence is exactly the purpose of the last two hours. There is a chill of eternity in the silence and the slide of angels’ wings. I see the Dore engraving which heads this post: a silent swirl around the Divine Majesty.

We stand in that silent swirl at Mass and we discover it’s not silent: for the entirety of it sings continually, Sanctus! Sanctus! Sanctus Dominus Deus Sabaoth! The hymn continually unites us to the one place, the one time, the one moment: the eternal now of what Dante called the White Rose of Paradise. We might, these days with our eastern overlap, think of it more as a lotus and we would not be wrong. The ancient Hindu geometric figures convey the same thing imagery of many-petaled forms around an all-embracing center. Recently in a discussion of this flower formed around the All-Holy Trinity in Dante, it was asked why everyone wasn’t rushing to the center: let me get in there! But, of course, that’s thinking as humans do. In submission to the will of God and yielding place to the others in the dance, one arrives exactly at the place where one should be. No location further in is desired or needed and to move out of place in the dance would be a sin. What, though, is the purpose of the dance?

Think of a prism, how light pours in on one side and is refracted out from another side. While never denying that God cannot reach eternity and infinity, being everywhere present and filling all things, he gives us that omnipresence and filling to reach ever more hearts drawing them in. God is the ground of being so each individual that participates in the act of being mediates God’s presence. For man, made in the image and likeness of God, our being is rooted in God and our hearts can contemplate the logoi or “words” in present in all created beings because we, too, through Baptism and the Church, participate in the Logos as God the Son is incarnate in human nature, restoring us to our place in the dance. We become the prism(s) through which the light is refracted to others around us. We are the way grace is actualized in the hearts of those around us (that they may see your good works and glorify your Father who is in heaven).

The Saints mediate this light to us, and the Church does so through the Sacraments: each one being a moment in time that is an actualization of the one eternity intersecting with us here. But that intersection pierces all of time: as the Incarnation is the presence of God in time, so now, the Son of God is the presence of humanity in Eternity. Each offering of the Mass is the one perpetual offering of the Son to the Father on the Cross by the Son. The Church is the Body of Christ offering himself to the Father though all of time.

This perpetual act of mediation frames literally everything the Christian does: God is in direct contact with everyone, but in his grace and in his humility, he is pleased to use everyone in mediation of this direct contact. It is no less direct here, for as the Consecrated Bread of the Eucharist is actually God so is his presence through mediation in your life and the life of those around you.

Let us close by returning to Handel and the silent, eternal song of Sanctus! Even music, well done, shares in this act of mediation: for we are creators like Our Heavenly Father, in whose likeness we share. Our creations, too, can serve as points of divine mediation. God can be present in the things we make, celebrating his glory even when not intended as such. This is why we can read the Gospel in E.T. as easily as in the Narnia stories. True acts of creation are, themselves, mediations of the one creator. Handel is reported to have composed the Messiah in 24 days and when he left his writing desk he is said to have exclaimed, “God has visited me.” Anyone who feels this in the music, or who sees it in the beauty of art or a building, or even in the beauty of another person, can confirm that God is present. For him who can read the signs, the same is true in mathematical code, or textual composition. As God is creator so are we and as we are ravished by beauty, so is he to give it to us by our own hands.