Ad Dominum

Very often in our eucharistic liturgy we grow accustomed to the daily, simple formulas, the divine call and response wherein we ask for something from God: forgive our sins, hear our prayer, intercede for our people and our world, bless our gifts, transform these mass-produced wafers and this foul-tasting wine into the Body and Blood of your son, bless us, and on and on. And of course God responds, hearing our prayers and forgiving us and making present for us the Christ, sacrificed and risen, in our very midst on our altars.

Such is not the nature of our God in its entirety: that’s not the whole story. Our God is a God of surprises; our God is a God of awe. In yesterday’s first reading we see this clearly demonstrated:

In the year King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a high and lofty throne, with the train of his garment filling the temple.

Seraphim were stationed above. They cried one to the other, “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of hosts! All the earth is filled with his glory!”

At the sound of that cry, the frame of the door shook and the house was filled with smoke.

Then I said, “Woe is me, I am doomed! For I am a man of unclean lips, living among a people of unclean lips; yet my eyes have seen the King, the LORD of hosts!”

Then one of the seraphim flew to me, holding an ember that he had taken with tongs from the altar.

He touched my mouth with it, and said, “See, now that this has touched your lips, your wickedness is removed, your sin purged.”

Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?”

“Here I am,” I said; “send me!”

(Isaiah 6:1-2a, 3-8)

Does that sound like our user-friendly Mass God? Hardly!

Sometimes our lives don’t always flow in a placid stream. We don’t usually travel through green pastures and still waters. More often than not we journey through wilderness lashed by wind and burning with fire. Perhaps this tells us something about the nature of God: not our comforting, ritualized God, but our troublemaker God, our awesome God, our God of surprises.

The Holy Father said yesterday in his Angelus address that:

In a majestic vision, Isaiah finds himself in the presence of the Thrice-Holy Lord and is seized by a great fear and by the profound feeling of his own unworthiness. After a seraph purifies his lips with a hot coal and takes away his sin, Isaiah is ready answer God’s call.

The next time you sing the Sanctus, reciting the well-known, “Holy, holy, holy,” try placing yourself in Isaiah’s sandals and consider what it might mean to stand before the glory of that God.

Pax et bonum.