Some days when celebrating Mass every word seems to surge into an extra dimension. It seems that the full depth of every word is somehow opening up to my mind and heart, and through the mystery of language we are transcending language. Then the loveliness of liturgy reveals it’s true power. These are not words I have made up. They are words that I have been given by my Holy Mother the Church. These words connect through me and past me to every priest everywhere today who has said Mass, and if this is so, then they connect me in an almost tangible cord to every priest everwhere down the ages who has said these words and been, through his ordination, configued to Christ.

It is as though the words are the leaves and the branches and that through them we have access through the trunk of history to the roots of all–to the ‘dearest, freshness, deep down things.’ You could say the specific is the key to the universal, the particular opens the door to the general. And this is the lesson of incarnation, that the Divine has become Man, that the Cosmic has entered the Chaos, that the General has become particular in one young girl, one pregnancy, one birth, one life, one death, one resurrection and because of this particular all has opened back out into the general so that through this Paschal and Eucharistic Mystery all shall live.