Liturgically Speaking: Entering into Heavenly Worship

In our liturgy each week (and every day), we take part in a foretaste of the heavenly liturgy.  I know, I know...  Mass doesn’t always seem like a foretaste of Heaven!  But we have to see behind the signs and the symbols (imperfect as they sometimes are) to the reality they contain.   

Consider: what will you do for all eternity in Heaven?  Play golf?  Drink daiquiris on the beach?  Play a harp on a cloud?  While that may be the first place our imaginations go, the truth is that we would quickly tire of even our favorite activities in eternity.  That’s because we were not created for these things.  We were created with an intellect to know the truth, and a will to choose and love the good.  That’s what separates us from the animals.  And we’re not made to know just any truth, or to choose just any love.  We’re made to know Truth and love Goodness itself; infinite Truth and Goodness.  Our ultimate desire as humans created in the image and likeness of God is to know and love God.  Our little desires for little goods along the way are but signs and foretastes of the real fulfillment to come.  As St. Augustine said, “You have created us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee.”  So what will we do for all eternity in Heaven?  We will worship, know, and love God, the source of infinite Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.    

The Liturgy is a school for Heaven.  It’s where we learn to know and love God in worship.  We get a hint of this in the opening lines of the Sanctus (Holy, Holy).  The words are derived from Isaiah 6:3 in which the Seraphim angels cry to one another the praises of God in the heavenly throne room of the Lord.  The words are echoed in a slightly different form by the four living creatures in Revelation 4:8.  In both cases, the words take place in the context of the heavenly worship of God.  Those who even now celebrate it without signs are already in the heavenly liturgy.

At each liturgy, as we are about to enter into the Eucharistic prayer, we hear the song of praise sung in the heavenly courts.  The liturgy itself is signaling to us what is about to happen – we are about to enter into and participate in that heavenly liturgy.  The Preface of the Mass, immediately before the Sanctus, often speaks even more explicitly of this participation.  Consider the conclusion of the Preface from the first Sunday of Advent:

And so, with Angels and Archangels,

with Thrones and Dominions,

and with all the hosts and Powers of heaven,

we sing the hymn of your glory,

as without end we acclaim:

What is unique and mysterious is the movement of the community beyond itself into a participation in the heavenly.  It is precisely this heavenly, transcendent understanding of liturgy that the Sanctus offers us on the cusp of the Eucharistic Prayer.  It is a sign that alerts us to the fact that we are now entering the heavenly courts, approaching the throne of God, and of the Lamb.  It awakens us to our participation, not in just our community worship, but in the wedding feast of the Lamb in the presence of all the angels and saints.  It is in this eternal liturgy that the Spirit and the Church enable us to participate whenever we celebrate the mystery of salvation in the sacraments.