Understanding the Eucharist

The Mass Series:

PART 3 – INTRODUCTORY RITES – OPENING PRAYER

The Opening Prayer really concludes the arc of the Introductory Rites, and it’s one of the most important prayers of the Mass.  In fact, if you take the Opening Prayers of the Missal, really they contain everything that the Church believes and teaches. They’re incredibly rich and dense little texts.  They’re a bit like a telegram, they’re highly concentrated in their language but, if you unpack them, they do contain everything that the Church believes and teaches.  They’re fascinating little prayers.

The priest begins by saying, ‘Let us pray.’  So he summons the whole community to enter into prayer.

And then there follows a moment of silence.  Now, what’s happening in the silence?  Everyone is praying in their hearts and in that silence having been drawn into the presence of God.  And then out of the silence the priest gathers up the prayer of everyone in the community.

And that’s why the traditional name for the Opening Prayer was ‘the Collect’.  Why? Because the priest collects the prayers of everyone there into a single voice and a single prayer.

The prayer is alway addressed to God the Father, and it’s always through the Son and in the power and unity of the Holy Spirit.

So, we start the opening prayer by saying Almighty, Ever-Living God, God our Father.  At the end of it we say through our Lord Jesus Christ, Your Son, in the unity of the Holy Spirit.

So again there is that essentially Trinitarian structure.  We who have been drawn into the life of the Trinity, are drawn more deeply into the life of the Trinity as we open our hearts in prayer.

The structure of the opening prayer, interestingly, looks back to the kind of prayer that you would have heard in Ancient Rome, in the state religion of Ancient Rome.  And it’s a structure which early Christianity inherited and then baptised it.  And this is what so often happens in the liturgy.

So these little prayers are not so little.  They’re short, but they are deep and they are rich.  And what they do is gather up the prayer of the entire Church in every time and in every place and well as the prayer of this particular community but also joining with the Church in Heaven because the prayer of the Mass at any point  is the prayer of the Church in Heaven and on Earth.

So the Mass in the sense celebrates the marriage of Heaven and Earth.

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