There are two similar memories linked to my childhood: in my house, in addition to the usual Palm Sunday "outfit", my sister and I used to wear for the first time a dress made by my grandmother (if she were still alive, it would be a influencer of sewing) on August 15, solemnity of the Assumption and, in our city, of the Virgen de los Reyes. The rite, the liturgy of that day began with getting up at dawn, around 6 a.m., having a quick breakfast (then there was an invitation), putting on the new costume and going to see the Virgin in her procession around the Cathedral. The other memory, similar perhaps, is those suitcases in which we always put a suit for the Sunday Mass, wherever we went, even to those farm-school camps where from Monday to Saturday you spent them muddy and learning to make queso.....
Thus, in a simple, imperceptible way, I learned that, for God, one put on one's best clothes inside and also outside. The heart prepared, the soul clean and the dress according to the greatness of the place, the moment in which we are going to take part. If every Mass is the cenacle, the Cross and the Resurrection, I hope that God will not catch me as if I were going to a cattle ranch.
It is amazing how the external helps to reach the depth, the futile to eternity. It is wonderful to enter into the nature of the Catholic liturgy and to know the symbolism of liturgical vestments, which play the role of those "visible signs" that help us enter into the grandeur of that to which we are called.
To despise external care at the expense of a misunderstood mysticism ends up breaking the unity that should exist between our conviction, our being, our acting and our appearance. To disregard it out of laziness is, if possible, even more painful.
Every day that we attend Mass we can remember that we are attending something more than a Royal Audience, and it is not the plan, as one acquaintance jokingly said, to save the finery for dinner with friends (or take a photo for Instagram) and show up on Sunday at the parish in the "Mass-going tracksuit", a sort of old, worn-out pair of pants, accompanied by a T-shirt and sneakers with stains.
Just as in a love relationship the alarms should go off when one of the two begins to downplay details of care in the way we treat each other, in our words, in our thoughts and in our appearance, so too should they go off if we do not care how we go to see the Lord. It is not a question of money, nor of style (even if this may be more informal), but of delicacy, of asking ourselves "could I meet the Lord in the same place? physically with the Lord without asking him to "wait" for me to go home and change? Well, bingo, that's what Mass is: physically meeting God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.
We don't go to Mass to be looked at, nor to rest, nor to listen to this or that priest... in fact, it's not even a question of go to to a place. The Mass, each one of them, is "heaven on earth", as he explains, in that marvelous book The Lamb's Supperthe convert Scott Hahn. If we have this opportunity to peek into the beauty of the infinite, are we really going to do it with our hearts and in the "wrapper" in a tracksuit?
After all, the Via pulchritudinis is not only the patrimony -never better said- of artistic manifestations, but is shared, in a certain way, through the beauty transmitted through each one of us, a parsimonious and limited reflection, but a reflection, of the beauty of God, to whose beauty we are called. imageLet us not forget, we have been created.
Editor-in-Chief at Omnes. Degree in Communication, with more than 15 years of experience in Church communication. She has collaborated in media such as COPE or RNE.
