Spirit Juice: Standing in the Gap

An excerpt from Thomas Howard’s “If Your Mind Wanders at Mass” (Steubenville, OH:
Franciscan University Press, 1995):

 “In the Kyrie ... we may hear the fathomless cry of the whole race of man ascending to heaven from the depths. Kyrie! goes up from all widows, and all dispossessed and brutalized children, and from all the maimed, and the prisoners and exiles, and from every sickbed, and indeed from all wounded beasts and, we could believe, from all rivers and seas stained with man's filth and landscapes scarred by his plunder. In the liturgy, somehow, we stand before the Lord in behalf of his whole groaning creation.”

"We stand before the Lord in behalf of His whole groaning creation." 

That line is unforgettable. It reframes the Mass from something we attend...to something we do for the entire world.

Every week...

The world groans.

A mother buries her child.

Approximately 150 veterans take their own lives.

A lonely teenager wonders if anyone would notice if they disappeared.

A prisoner stares at another concrete wall.

A forest burns.

An ocean carries another load of our garbage.

And somewhere...

An ambulance siren cuts through the night.

The world is always crying.

The question is...

Who's listening?

Most of us scroll past the suffering.

Another headline.

Another tragedy.

Another war.

Another disaster.

We've become spectators to pain.

But the Mass asks something radically different.

When we pray,

"Lord, have mercy."

We're not just asking for ourselves.

We're standing before God on behalf of the whole world.

The widow.

The orphan.

The lost.

The addict.

The lonely.

The refugee.

The unborn.

The forgotten.

Even creation itself.

The rivers.

The forests.

The oceans.

The creatures entrusted to our care.

Their groaning becomes our prayer.

That's what the Church has always done.

She gathers the cries no one else hears...

...and carries them to the throne of mercy.

Think about that.

While the world argues...

The Church intercedes.

While social media reacts...

The Church kneels.

While everyone else is shouting...

The Bride of Christ whispers two words that have echoed for nearly two thousand years:

Kyrie Eleison.

Lord...

Have mercy.

Those aren't words of defeat.

They're words of hope.

Because mercy isn't pretending evil doesn't exist.

Mercy is believing God's love is greater than evil.

The Mass isn't an escape from reality.

It's where reality is gathered, lifted up, and united to Christ.

Then comes the dismissal.

"Ite, missa est."

Go.

Not because church is over.

Because your mission is beginning.

The same hands folded in prayer...

...are sent to feed the hungry.

The same lips that cried, "Lord, have mercy"...

...are sent to speak mercy.

The same heart that carried the world's burdens to the altar...

...is sent back into the world carrying Christ.

So the next time you hear an ambulance...

Don't just notice it.

Pray.

The next time you read about another war...

Pray.

The next time you see someone carrying a burden you can't fix...

Pray.

Become the person who instinctively whispers,

"Kyrie eleison."

Because that's what priests do.

And through Baptism...

That's what you are.

Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, make us people who stand in the gap for a groaning world.

The Christian is not called to be a commentator on the world's suffering, but an intercessor within it.

Image Credit: Reto Stöckli, Nazmi El Saleous, and Marit Jentoft-Nilsen, NASA GSFC

This true-color image shows North and South America as they would appear from space 35,000 km (22,000 miles) above the Earth. The image is a combination of data from two satellites. The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) instrument aboardNASA’s Terrasatellite collected the land surface data over 16 days, while NOAA’sGeostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) produced a snapshot of the Earth’s clouds. https://science.nasa.gov/earth/earth-observatory/earth-from-space-885/