Sending God wafting out with the incense...

[anglomedved]

27 May 2010

 I watched with interest the YouTube of the SSPX group in Antwerp that Igor sent me. I have a certain sympathy with the old-fashioned the east-facing celebration of the mass as recognizing the might and glory of God. Yet I am uneasy: it can push God out into the ‘yonder’, conveniently distant.

 West-facing celebration forces the ‘God with us’ – we have to come to terms with the fact that this God of glory wants to be with us, to become very tangible to us in our midst and in our very depths, individually and perhaps also corporately. Rather than have Him waft out of the east window or to the apex of the reredos in clouds of incense, we meet this Deus tremens et timendus when we really start to search for God in the depths of our hearts and experience the mixture of fear and hope as we come closer to the place, the morada, where the Trinity dwells in us.

And the God we push out there becomes once more the distant, incomplete God of the Old Testament.