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Tuesday, March 26, 2013

The Mass

Let's start simply. The first thing that most teenagers think of when people say something related to the Church is how boring and long the Mass is. However, if you were to truly know and believe what happens in the Mass, you would want to go every day and partake in the true nature of the Mass.

At the beginning of the Mass, Scripture is read, usually a reading from the Old Testament, a Psalm, and two from the New Testament. I hope that all of us have aspirations to end up in heaven after we die. Imagine that you are being talked to by God in heaven and He is telling you his life story. That is exactly what you are experiencing when you listen to Scripture in the Liturgy of the Word in the Mass. After the end of the Gospel, The priest or deacon gives a homily on the Scripture that you just listened to. The homily translates the scripture (which can sometimes be hard to understand considering it was written thousands of years ago) and puts it into your native language at the current time so that you can understand it more fully. Then comes the heart of and soul of the Mass (no pun intended), a reenactment. We reenact the Last Supper that Jesus performed thousands of years ago. So after all these thousands of years, the priest says the exact same words that Jesus said at the supper before he died. The priest proceeds to transform, right in front of your eyes, the bread into the actual body of Jesus. After this takes place he turns the wine into the actual blood of Jesus. When we go up to eat the body and blood of Christ, we literally eat Jesus' body and drink His blood. After Communion, the final blessing is said, and we get to go back to our home and do whatever it is that we do on Sunday's but we try to abstain from excessive work.

Summing it all up, if you like hearing stories about superheroes that have every superpower that ever was, if you like it when stories about superheroes are sometimes confusing and people simplify them for you so that you can understand them better, if you happen to like history and you like present day reenactments of historical events, if you like magic (except this time its not a trick) where something actually transforms into something else, then the Mass is for you!