A Pattern in the Mass

Extract

Not much of a Red Sea, a mere smudge of holy-water dabbed at in the porch, but in the moment that it takes we have left Egypt, the door has closed behind us like the pillar of cloud and we set out on our journey up the aisle into the domain of the holy, to the mountain of God. The Sinaitic fire burns in sanctuary lamp and candle-flame; the limit of approach is fixed. ‘Judge me, O God, and distinguish my cause from the nation that is not holy’. To say that is to accept the responsibility of being God's holy people. Far from being merely a self-righteous expression of religious apartheid, it is an appeal to God to implement his choice, to give us the grace to fulfil the priestly purpose of the making of the nation. ‘Send forth thy light and thy truth … And I will go unto the altar of God’. To be ‘distinguished’ in this way by God's choice of us in baptism is to enter into the creative pattern, the opus divisionis; land emerging from the abyss; light separated from darkness; a separation not destructive but creative.