The Mass Part III

The Mass Part III is obviously the 3rd in a series of posts taking much of the information from a teaching mass and putting into written form.  You can click these links to see Part I and Part II.  I think the Mass Part III delves into a part of the Mass that we frequently buzz through and miss the importance of it.

After the homily we end up at the Profession of faith.  We clearly state what we believe.  If you read it carefully you will see what the major issues were in the Church back in the day.  Very clearly states ONE GOD and based in a Trinitarian Church it has three sections.  One for each member of the trinity! We stand professing this as a community of faith.  There will be a whole blog in this in the future.

From here we move to what was the Prayers of the Faithful and is now called the Universal Prayers.  We pray for our Church and our world.  We realize through these prayers that we are just on parish, city, country and even language among the many.

Then we come to one of the processions and what happens gets lost in the collection.  We give our our lives to make our money.  That is very much apart of who and what we are.  We give the gifts symbolically as our lives and in fact place our selves on the altar asking God to transform us into the Body and Blood or our Lord and Savior.

The procession with the gifts is all of us spiritually working our way down the the altar and after the preparation of the Gifts the priest says:

Pray my brothers and Sisters

that my sacrifice and yours maybe

acceptable to God the Almighty father.

We then have a final prayer and into the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayers.

In Short

After the Liturgy of the Word we move to a section that gets overlooked, but carries an amazing about of significance in terms of symbolism and the purpose for the celebration itself.  We are there to be transformed so that we can go forth to transform.