The Holy Mass

This meditation on the Mass by the mystic Von Speyr contains many penetrating insights, particularly about the nature of the Mass as sacrifice--of Christ, of his priest, and of every believer united in and with the entire Church--expressed with a poetic layering of concepts and images that is at once complex and lucid, dense and transparent. The meditation rewards the present-day reader's effort with a fresh and palpable sense that the real truth of the Church's constant re-presentation, re-enactment of Christ's "sacrifice once offered" transcends not only the nearly half-a-century since Von Speyer's meditation, but all time --time which is itself sanctified precisely through the endless repetition of the Sacrament of unity that is the Holy Mass.