On Grandeur and Intimacy

My wife and I are parishioners at the Cathedral of Saint Paul in St. Paul, Minnesota. The building itself is a magnificent structure, filled with intricate and meaningful detail. The very grandeur that is so captivating, causing first time visitors to gasp when first stepping foot in the doors, suggests the surpassing majesty of the God who is worshipped therein. Statuary, stained glass, bronze grills, a towering baldakin set atop impossible marble monoliths, a grand dome, and so much more leave the visitor in little doubt about the lofty, sublime transcendence of God.

This is something my wife and I have come to appreciate highly. God—Father, Son, and Holy Spirit—is majestic (and so much more so than the lone word implies). God is sublimely transcendent. Even 21^st-century Americans, many of whom have never experienced an earthly royal court, are familiar enough with the marks of honor (say, at a wedding, where the bride is so honored; or at a funeral, where the deceased is) to understand that a certain regal formality is only fitting for a king or queen. Without it, the regent (or bride, or deceased) is robbed of honor that is due. How much more so for the King of kings!

“Ah,” might say some of my Protestant friends, “but it all makes God seem so high, so aloof, so distant, and not our closest friend.” True, there exists the possibility that one might think of the God of the Cathedral of Saint Paul as one who is unreachable in prayer, unattainable in relationship, ungraspable in comprehension…

…until Mass.

The fact is, God is exactly that to those who are strangers, aliens, enemies (as says Sacred Scripture), distanced by the willful fleeing of his creatures into their own, autopetal volition. But while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. And every day of the year (save one) the Catholic faithful around the world come to meet this high, majestic, transcendent God in the Way made present: the sacrifice of the Mass. And this sublime God who seems (and is) so far beyond our mental, physical, emotional, imaginational, spiritual grasp, comes to meet them through Jesus Christ’s real, sacramental presence, shared out in the most intimate way: through a union actualized by the eating of flesh and drinking of blood (which actually does happen every day), as prescribed by the Lord himself.

There is something so very right about this juxtaposition of sublime transcendence and deep intimacy. The closest friend—for indeed, He is—we receive in the Eucharist is unlike any other friend we’ve had, yet our closest friend He remains. The majestic grandeur of the Cathedral is centered around a genuflected tabernacle where He dwells and a bowed altar where He lays. Organs play, choirs sing, clergy process, incense rises, bells ring, people stand and bow and kneel, and in the center of all the ritualistic formalities and humble solemnity of the liturgy—crying out in prayer to this unfathomably great God—He comes. Not in thunder and lightning. Not in fire or wind. In bread and wine. In body and blood. In person.

…to love.