The House of God
By Fr. Conor Donnelly
(Proofread)
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the Psalms we are told, “How lovely are your tabernacles, O Lord of Hosts! My soul longs and faints for the courts of the Lord” (Ps. 84:1-2).
We know, by the teaching of our faith, that those who are enjoying the Beatific Vision in heaven are not rendered indifferent by their beatitude to the events that take place on earth.
Our Lord tells us in the Gospel that “there is joy in heaven over one sinner who repents” (Luke 15:7).
The Blessed, therefore, are not only interested in the affairs of the Church Militant, but are capable of receiving joy and gladness from all that on earth gives new glory to God or witnesses to the triumph of His grace.
This being so, we can be certain that the great saint whose feast we are celebrating today (St. Nicholas of Myra, feast on December 6), and to whom this Church is named after, dedicated, experiences, in the depths of his beatified soul, a great thrill of gladness at the beauty that has been given to this house of God through the zeal of the pastor of this parish and the generosity of its faithful.
It is not, of course, the material splendor that through your offerings has been imparted to this Church alone that gives this thrill of happiness to St. Nicholas, but still more the deep faith and the great love of God, which have inspired this generosity.
There are many who, echoing the words of the traitor Apostle Judas, will have the baseness to cavil at the sum spent on the adornment of God’s tabernacles and to assert that the money could have been employed more fittingly in the relief of the poor; but such a protest never rises to the lips of one in whose heart there is the least spark of the love of Jesus Christ and zeal in His cause.
Hence it is, that those who are poor in the goods of this world, but rich in the possession of a strong and living faith, never hesitate to draw upon their scanty store in order to give Our Divine Lord a home a little less unworthy of Him.
It is true that He consents to be worshipped in lonely places and beneath humble roofs, and that the first acts of homage that He received on earth were offered to Him in a stable; but we must remember that it was His great love for us and the hard-heartedness of men that forced Him to make of a cave in the hillside in Bethlehem His first tabernacle in this world.
But the generosity of His love for us should not make us ungenerous to Him. Had Mary and Joseph the power and the means, they would surely have prepared a more sumptuous shelter for the Divine Infant, and would, in fact, have considered nothing too grand or too beautiful for Him.
So it is that true Christians have at all times given of their wealth and of their talents, to raise for the Lord dwelling places as beautiful and as magnificent as human genius, inspired by ardent piety and faith, could create.
And it is meet and right that the edifice where the acts of Christian worship are exercised should be stately and grandiose, expressing in the very harmony of its proportions and in the perfection of its decorations the attitude of the worshipping soul before its God.
Were our Catholic churches mere meeting houses where men gather for no other purpose but to pray in common and to listen to pious exhortations, it is quite comprehensible that they should be simple in structure and differ in nothing but in size from the places where individuals offer their private prayers to God.
But the church is not a mere house of assembly for prayer. It is something immeasurably grander than that: it is the trysting place of God and man. It is the place where man is brought in contact with his Creator through the Sacrifice of the Great Mediator between God and man, Jesus Christ.
The beautiful structures in stone with which the piety of the faithful has covered Christian lands have been raised in order to be a suitable setting, as well as a fitting shelter, for the Christian table of sacrifice.
It is our great privilege—the great privilege of us Catholics—that “we have an altar whereof they have no power to eat who serve the tabernacle” (Heb. 13:10). Nor is this privilege enjoyed by those who, in breaking away from the unity of the faith, rejected both priesthood and sacrifice.
The altar is the center of a Christian church; it is that in reason of which the whole structure has been raised. Every line of the building should be made to converge on it, and every device of architecture should be used for the purpose of directing both sense and spirit towards the point where the great mystery—the Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ—is offered daily.
For the Catholic, the altar effaces itself and presents, to the eyes of faith and to the eyes of the soul, the austere slopes of Calvary—the hill of reconciliation—and shows them streaming empurpled [with] the saving Blood of Jesus Christ.
There each morning the great drama of Good Friday is set forth. As each sun rises, its rays fall on the figure of Our Divine Lord, elevated by the hands of His priests as on the Cross and pleading, through His precious Wounds, with His Heavenly Father for pardon, mercy, and grace for sinful and sinning men.
As the awesome words of Consecration fall from the priest’s lips, the death of Our Redeemer is mystically enacted, and that death is winning from God all those graces through which sin is expiated and the hearts of the wayward and the erring are moved to repentance.
At the Mass Our Great High Priest Jesus, speaking on our behalf and identifying Himself with us, offers to God His own perfect dispositions of absolute submission to the Divine Will, and entreats His Heavenly Father to be moved by these most perfect and most holy dispositions to grant to men every saving grace.
And we who are privileged to be the living members of Jesus Christ draw near to the table of sacrifice and, in union with Our Divine Lord’s offering, send up before the throne of God the expression of our sorrow for sin and our desire to be conformed to His Holy Will.
Our worship and our prayers ascend from the altar, presented to God by Our Great High Priest, Jesus Christ. He clothes them with the merits of His Passion and Death, with the dreadful expiatory sufferings of His victimhood.
And God, rendered thereby propitious to us, opens the treasures of His saving grace and pours out on souls of good will all the spiritual and temporal blessings that they need in their passage through this world to eternity.
“Every high priest,” says St. Paul, “taken from among men is ordained for men in the things that appertain to God, that he may offer up gifts and sacrifices for sin” (Heb. 5:1). In every Catholic church and on each morning, this function is being fulfilled by Our Divine Lord. The gifts and sacrifices that He is offering to God are His own sufferings and death as testifying to the complete subjection of Himself to, and love of, the Holy Will of God.
As Our Mediator, He enters the Holy of Holies in heaven to present to God the sacrifice of our repentant hearts, and returns, bearing to us all the graces and blessings that Our Heavenly Father, moved by the merits of His Divine Son, is ready to bestow on us.
The whole of the great mystery of our faith—the Mystical Sacrifice of Jesus Christ—is accomplished each day on the altar of each Catholic church. Is it astonishing that men should exhaust all the resources of human genius in their endeavor to create a structure in stone and marble, which should be a not-too-unbecoming setting for the stupendous drama of man’s salvation?
But it is not only in a transient manner, and during the short moments in which the Sacrifice of the Mass is being accomplished, that Our Lord is present with us. He has, in His great love for men, elected to abide with us after He has accomplished, on our behalf, with God, His function as priest.
Sharing our nature, He has deigned to stay until the end of time in our midst. The words of Consecration not only effect the mystical death of Christ; they also, as it were, constrain Him to tarry with us here below for our consolation and our help.
At the Mass He becomes a new Emmanuel—God with us—and the church becomes His home on earth. The great temple of Jerusalem was glorious in the eyes of the Jews, and was made by them one of the wonders of the ancient world, because it contained the Ark of God’s covenant with men.
How much more glorious is the purpose that is served by our Catholic churches in that they are raised to shelter the Son of God Himself—Jesus Christ, true God and true man! “This is the house of God and the gate of heaven” (Gen. 28:17), we are told in Scripture.
Here Our Savior dwells as in a home on earth. He does not live here in silent aloofness from the affairs of men, burying Himself in seclusion and giving access only to a privileged few, to the richly endowed of divine grace. This is not so.
He is now as approachable as when He walked the soil of Palestine and was thronged about by multitudes, all of whom He received kindly and never dismissed except as laden with blessings. The doors of His earthly dwelling are wide open to admit all—and by preference, the sorrow-laden, the simple, and those who are weary with life’s bitter struggle against pain and want. He is always here, waiting for our coming, desiring that we should come, and is ever prepared to give us audience.
Life for all of us is a “valley of tears” (Ps. 84:6), and the deep murmurings of every human soul have always as their burden the tale of weariness, of pain, of sorrow, and of disappointment. Jesus knows the sad lot that has become ours by the sin of our First Parents and by our own.
He Himself has trod the way of pain and tears and blood, and He is not therefore one “who cannot have compassion on our infirmities, but one tempted in all things like as we are, without sin” (Heb. 4:15).
From under the sacramental veils, He beholds with pity our trials, our struggles, and our failures. His love does not allow Him to remain afar off, and to contemplate our sorrows from on High. He takes up His abode in the very heart of the storm and strife amidst which our spiritual destiny is wrought out.
Grace after grace is poured forth from the recesses of the tabernacle to encourage, to sustain, and to carry us to victory in the bitter struggles we have to make to save our souls from the enemies of our salvation. And at times, He calls us from the strife to come and repose ourselves at His feet and seek from Him healing for the wounds received in the spiritual combats.
“Come to me, all you who labor and are heavy burdened, and I will give you rest” (Matt. 11:28), He whispers to each of us.
How often, when we are reeling under the weight of some great sorrow, the soft red light of the sanctuary lamp, as we push open the church door, falls on us like the touch of a gentle healing hand. It speaks to our wounded hearts of the great, warm, compassionate Heart that beats behind the tabernacle door, and draws us there to cast our griefs into that great abyss of compassion.
The bright, cheerful glow of the sanctuary lamp draws us like another star of Bethlehem. And there at the altar we find Jesus with Mary His Mother and St. Joseph, and having confided to these three our care and our anguish, we rise refreshed and return to face life’s struggle once more with renewed courage and energy.
What a sad world it is for those for whom there shines no sanctuary lamp. How sad for those who know not what it means, and how sad above all for those who turn their back upon its light and resent its mute appeal.
The house of God Our Father is, necessarily, the home of us who are His children by grace. The roof-tree under which we have been born, where we have grown up under our parents’ care, and where the character on which depends our success or failure in life was formed, is dear to us for the many memories which cling to it.
But we have a twofold life; there is the one we have received from our parents, and there is the other, the real and lasting one, that we have received from God. The former is transient and disappears in a few short years; the latter is meant to endure for all eternity.
By the gift of sanctifying grace we are truly born of God, receiving in the act of Baptism a participation of God’s life, as we are assured by the words of St. Peter: “He has given us most great and precious promises, that by these you may be made partakers of the divine nature” (2 Pet. 1:4). And Our Lord, speaking to Nicodemus, told him that a man cannot possess real life “unless he be born again of water and the Holy Spirit” (John 3:5).
It is at the baptismal font that we truly come to birth, because it is there that God becomes Our Father. It is the church that witnesses the dawn of our real life; again, it is within its walls that we reach maturity and through the sacrament of Confirmation, attain to spiritual manhood.
It is at the Sacred Banquet spread before the altar that this divine life in us is nourished and developed, and our supernatural strength is restored when it has declined through temptation and failure.
In Holy Communion the Body and Blood of Christ becomes the food and the drink of our souls, ministering to us interior health and imparting interior vigor. We traverse all those great phases of the mysterious life that is in our souls by grace, its birth, its nutrition, its growth beneath the Church’s roof.
And if we pass from the visible acts of religion and penetrate to the inner recesses of the soul, we shall witness, in the seclusion of the confessional, happenings in comparison with which the events chronicled in men’s histories are less than a shadow of reality. It is there that the created spirit comes face to face with its God. It is there that is worked out the whole drama of the soul’s vital relations with its Creator, in the vicissitudes it presents through the triumphs and failures of God’s grace.
Hour by hour, the soul is being drawn by God to Himself, and at one time the angels contemplate with wonder the soul’s blindness and resistance, and at another are transported with joy at its surrender to the advances of Him who has proved His love for it by death.
In the Confessional the penitent sinner imparts to the minister of Christ the story of this inner, hidden life, and hears from his lips the words of peace and reconciliation. Home joys are wonderfully sweet, but what joys have we ever tasted in our earthly home that can equal in transport those we have felt as we have come forth from the tribunal of penance after having deposited there, perhaps, the burden of years of infidelity and felt in our souls once more the embrace of the God from whom we had become estranged.
We go forth from the church and return to ordinary life in a very ecstasy of happiness, feeling our whole being aglow with the experience of the extraordinary mercy and tenderness of Our God. Our experience is like that of the woman in the Gospel when she heard the Savior say, “Neither do I condemn you; go and sin no more” (John 8:11).
And then when the light of this world is growing dark to our eyes and the walls of our earthly habitation are crumbling to decay; when neither the love of those dear to us nor the skill of those devoted to us is of any avail to retain us here below, it is to our true home on earth, the church, that our eyes instinctively turn.
And we do not look in vain: the door swings open, and Christ’s minister comes forth, bearing with him That which can give us life everlasting. And finally, before the tomb closes over us, it is to the church that our body shall pay its last visit, and it is from there that it shall be borne to its last eternal repose.
It is thus that the church becomes for the Christian porta caeli, the vestibule of heaven, after having been, during His brief sojourn on earth, the home wherein took place all the great events that marked the course of His supernatural life.
It is natural then, my dear brethren, that you should love your church and take pride in its adornment as being your home. Its beauty should be as dear to you as that of your own earthly home.
Rather it should be dearer, for the church is in a true sense the real home of the Christian. It is therefore a matter of legitimate rejoicing for the pastor of this parish to contemplate today all that has been done during the past few years to beautify and ennoble this already beautiful building.
His gratitude goes out to all who have had a share in this work, and he invokes on them the blessing of the great St. Nicholas, to whom it is dedicated.
Our beloved Archbishop, with characteristic generosity, has given largely and sympathetically. In spite of the numberless calls upon his slender resources, he has been able to remember in a very practical manner the parish of St. Nicholas of Myra.
The sodalities of the men and women, the Children of Mary, and the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament have labored indefatigably, and deserve a special note of thanks.
May all benefactors to the church receive as their reward a favorable answer to all the petitions they send up to the throne of God, within its sacred walls.
I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
EW
Based on The Voice of a Priest, “Sermon Four,” by Edward Leen, C.S.Sp. (Sheed & Ward, 1946).