Kicking it up a notch

Tyne Daly, of “Cagney and Lacey” fame is currently starring on Broadway in Terrence McNally’s “Master Class.”  She plays the role of soprano Maria Callas in the twilight of her career.  The play follows Callas as she coaches aspiring singers at Julliard.   At one point, she asks one of her students to exit and re- enter the classroom saying, “Enter again, take the stage, own it.   This is opera, not a vocal recital!”  The student replies, “I thought this was a classroom.”  Callous was trying to teach the student to approach her lesson as if it were an actual performance, with an attitude befitting a revered opera, with heightened awareness and imagination, awe and wonder, transforming an ordinary practice experience into something extraordinary.

Like the students in “Master Class,” we too are taught by the liturgy to see and experience ordinary stuff  as extraordinary.  For in the Mass, ordinary things are treated with utmost reverence, books are lifted high, furniture is kissed, bread and wine are blessed.   Ordinary activities take on new meaning, walking becomes processing, reading becomes proclaiming, singing becomes praising.    We, ordinary humans,  are also treated with extraordinary reverence.   We are blessed, incensed, sprinkled with holy water, lathered with sacred oil, and fed with the body and blood of Christ.   We too take on a new meaning as a human assembly becomes a divine body.    

We could call the liturgy our “Spiritual Master Class.”  It teaches us that God has first loved us and looked upon us and our world with awe and wonder.   Thus, everything has been touched by God’s grace.  Let us pray that as we are sent forth from the liturgy, we might look upon the world as God does, as the liturgy “schools” us, with new awe, wonder and reverence.

O Lord, help us to see as you see.  Amen.