We are looking at a section from the Canon of the Mass each week, to learn what the ‘law of praying’ has to teach us about what we believe. You can find the previous posts in this series in our reflections archive.

Remember also, Lord, your servants N. and N.,
who have gone before us with the sign of faith
and rest in the sleep of peace.
Grant them, O Lord, we pray,
and all who sleep in Christ,
a place of refreshment, light and peace.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

Once again we stop to pray for people by name. This time we remember those who have died. And, once again, as with the living, we remind ourselves that God does not need our prayers to help the departed, but that he gives us this privilege of being able to assist them through our acts of love.

We can’t ever be sure where someone has gone after death. The only people we can be certain about are canonised saints — those that the Church has declared definitively to be in heaven. That doesn’t mean no one else is in heaven. It just means we’re not sure where anyone else is. And so we can pray for them. If they’re in heaven and they don’t need our prayers, the prayer is not wasted. And I’m sure that saint repays our charity by praying for us in return.

When we die, few of us are perfect. So when we die, even though our sins may have been forgiven, we might not yet be ready for heaven. The moral life is about far more than keeping rules, or even breaking rules and being forgiven. Our actions change us. The moral life for a Christian is about the kind of person we become and the characters we form through our actions. From the moment we leave the confessional, freshly absolved, our sins are forgiven. But we are not yet saints. We have to ask ourselves, even if we went to confession now and knew every single one of our sins were forgiven, would we still want to be as we currently are for the rest of eternity? Most of us are not ready for heaven just yet. Neither were so many who have gone before us.

This section of our prayer reminds us both to form good characters and to help the departed through our prayers. It presents Purgatory as somewhere uncomfortably warm and dry, dark and restless. Because the soul thirsts for God, and longs for his light, and, as St Augustine famously put it, ‘Our heart are restless until they rest in you, O Lord.’

Purgatory could work perfectly well without us — in fact, surely, God could do all the work that needs to be done in purgatory better, more efficiently, and faster if he didn’t choose to rely on us. But he gives real power to our prayers, because when we pray for the dead, it really helps them. And he gives our prayer real meaning, because the dead really aren’t helped, unless we pray for them. And so the work of purification taking place in the Church in purgatory is genuinely brought about with the participation of the Church on earth.

We are looking at a section from the Canon of the Mass each week, to learn what the ‘law of praying’ has to teach us about what we believe. You can find the previous posts in this series in our reflections archive.

In humble prayer we ask you, almighty God:
command that these gifts be borne
by the hands of your holy Angel
to your altar on high
in the sight of your divine majesty,
so that all of us, who through this participation at the altar
receive the most holy Body and Blood of your Son,
may be filled with every grace and heavenly blessing.
Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

There is an idea present throughout the scriptures that our earthly realities reflect in some way the heavenly realities. Especially when it comes to the worship of God, what we do down here somehow shares in the more perfect, the more effective, the more real version of the same thing taking place in heaven.

This is very similar to the philosophy of Plato, who taught that the ‘ideal’ version of all things existed in a heavenly realm, and that earthly things participated in these ideal forms. The Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria thought the Greek Plato got so much right, the only explanation must have been that he had secretly read the Old Testament and stolen all his ideas from Moses!

In the Old Testament, the liturgy of the tabernacle and then of the Temple is based on the heavenly liturgy. In the book of Exodus (24:10), Moses is taken up the mountain and sees God. And he’s told to copy a heavenly model of the sanctuary that he’s shown (Ex. 25:40, 26:30, 27:8). The Jerusalem Temple is, as we read in the book of Wisdom, ‘a copy of the holy tent that [God] prepared from the beginning’ (Wis. 9:8). And this is further elaborated in Hebrews, where we learn that the earthly sanctuaries ‘serve a copy and shadow of the heavenly sanctuary; for when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was instructed by God, saying, “See that you make everything according to the pattern which was shown to you on the mountain.”’ (Heb. 8:5)

The worship of the Old Testament was meant to be an implementation of a heavenly blueprint. But because it was only an imitation in an earthly sanctuary, that worship could never be perfect. In order to be perfect, we want to share in the actual worship of heaven. In the Letter to the Hebrews, we read:

But when Christ came as a high priest of the good things to come, then through the greater and more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation), he entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption. (Hebrews 9:11–12)

That greater and more perfect tent not made by human hands is God’s Temple of heaven itself. When Christ ascended into heaven, he entered the heavenly sanctuary to function as a priest. Again in that same letter,

Christ did not enter a sanctuary made by human hands, a mere copy of the true one, but he entered into heaven itself, now to appear in the presence of God on our behalf. (Hebrews 9:24)

Christ’s sacrifice was perfect — not only in terms of what was offered and who offered it, but also because of where it was offered, in an eternal, heavenly temple. St Paul makes it clear that because Christ’s sacrifice is perfect, it actually works. Because Christ completes his offering in heaven, in an eternal sanctuary, the effects of that sacrifice continue throughout all time. Christ’s death doesn’t just redeem those who were around at the time of the Crucifixion, but Christ is now seated at the right hand of the Father, living for ever to intercede for us, and we get a glimpse of that when the Mass is offered. That eternal sacrifice that Christ offers on a heavenly altar is brought down to our earthly altar. We get a glimpse of heaven and the heavenly liturgy, veiled under the forms of bread and wine. We are reminded that Christ is offering himself for us, and we get an opportunity to join our prayers to that offering.

This is also reassuring. No matter how hard we try to make our earthly worship the best it can be (and nothing but our best should be good enough for God) it will always fall short of perfection. The effectiveness of the Mass is not down to how much we concentrate on our prayers, on how well the priest pronounces the words, or the building or the music that accompanies the sacrifice. The one who offers the sacrifice is Christ himself — in heaven. We know his offering is perfect, and therefore ours is too. Every Mass, celebrated in any rite or language, by a good priest or a bad priest, with a congregation or without one, offered publicly in a beautiful cathedral or secretly in a prison camp, all of these are the same, united to that one perfect sacrifice that Christ himself offers for us in heaven.