I Get Down on My Knees and I Start to Pray (Praise the Lord!)

There are certain parts of the Mass that act as sort of a prayer/response sort of deal.  By that, I mean that the priest, deacon, or reader will say one thing, to which we all respond together as a congregation.  Certain things are especially meant to be said by the priest celebrant who is acting “in the person of Christ”…or as we say in Latin (really, how shocked are you that there’s a Latin version of this phrase?) in personae Christi.  When you give this some thought, we see that it’s important that we all play our parts as part of the larger Body of Christ (“the Church,” in this sense) and that we remember the parts that others (namely the priest in this example) play apart from ourselves.

One example of when I notice several people “overstepping their bounds” in what IS and is NOT their part in the large prayer that is the Mass is our next, and final part of the Eucharistic Prayer: the Doxology.  The word Doxology, comes from the Latin Doxologia.  But since that clears up absolutely nothing, let’s break that word down.  Doxa, in Latin, means ”glory,” while the word logos means “word.”  Essentially, a “doxology” is a “word of glory,” or generally speaking, praising God through words.  Adding this concept to the Eucharistic Prayer was likely borrowed from our Jewish roots and the Kaddish, a prayer of the sanctification of the name of God found in Jewish synagogue services.  So what does the Doxology look like at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer?  Like this:

Current Text:

Through him, with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, almighty Father, forever and ever.

Beginning Advent 2011:

Through him, and with him, and in him, to you, O God, almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, is all honor and glory, forever and ever.

Now, we’ve been talking about Jesus right before the Doxology, so the antecedent to that “him” pronoun (sorry to make you reach WAY back in your grammar memory banks for those two terms) is Jesus.  The priest is essentially concluding the Eucharistic Prayer with an affirmation that what we are doing in the Mass is ultimately to give glory and honor to Him, who makes it all possible in the first place.

And, of course, after the Doxology, the congregation gives a unified, and emphatic (usually through song) AMEN!