The Mass

Our faith is rooted in our belief in the Incarnation - that God became a human being, Jesus of Nazareth, and dwelt among us. Because of this, unlike some religious traditions, we do not believe that the physical is of less importance than the spiritual. We believe that human nature, and the whole physical world has been restored to perfection through God taking on human form and his life, death, and resurrection. We believe God wants us to live our lives to the full and, as a result, our Anglo-Catholic spirituality emphasises charity, hospitality, and service. Our worship too involves all our senses and is centred around physical rituals known as the sacraments.

The sacraments (from the Latin word for ‘mystery’) are ceremonies or ritual acts in which we believe that we encounter the power of God. We believe these rituals are not just symbolic but that God’s grace becomes especially present during them. They are ‘an outward sign of inward grace’. They are the focus of our relationship with God and each other.

The most important of the sacraments is the Eucharist, a word which means ‘giving thanks’ in Greek. The service in which we celebrate the Eucharist is known as the Mass. In it, after hymns and readings from the Bible, the priest prays over bread and wine in a re-enactment and memorial of Jesus’ actions at his Last Supper with his disciples, the night before he was crucified. We see these events as linked: Jesus declared that the bread and wine he blessed was his body and blood that would be offered as a sacrifice to redeem the whole world.  We believe that Jesus spoke truthfully and that, when the priest blesses the bread and the wine, that Christ becomes truly present in them. We believe that, as we eat and drink them, we therefore receive into us the life and being of God himself which forgives, heals, and restores us into his image.

The ceremony of the Eucharist is designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring, intimate, and welcoming all at the same time. In this way, it makes God present amongst us, who is himself all those things. The priest wears special clothes called vestments, whose design goes back to the earliest Church history. We use burning incense, just as was used in the ancient Temple in Jerusalem, to represent our prayers rising up to God. And we ring bells at certain points in the service to indicate when Christ has come to be with us in a new and special way.

Because of our belief in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we treat the blessed bread and wine (consecrated elements) with extreme reverence. Apart from on Good Friday, some of the bread is kept always (‘reserved’) in a special box-like cupboard on the High Altar known as the Tabernacle. A lamp constantly burns above it to indicate the presence of Christ in our midst. We call this reserved bread ‘the Blessed Sacrament’ and on special occasions it is set on the altar for us to pray in front of.