JUSTUM EST: IT IS RIGHT AND FITTING

I want to walk with you through the eucharistic (i.e., thanksgiving) prayer. This prayer is at the heart of the Sunday liturgy. Already the Spirit has led this worshipping people in hearing and responding to God's Word. The biblical proclamation calls us to conversion, to letting God turn our hearts around and over. The Spirit instructs our hearts so that we are ready to enact, to do the eucharistic prayers.

The prayer is a dialogue, i.e., a word spoken between God and the assembled church (a vertical prayer axis), as well as between the presiding priest and the rest of the Assembly (a horizontal prayer axis). The nature of dialogical prayer is a back and forth rhythm. We also experience this in litanies and in devotional prayer.

The entire Assembly, priest and people, stand to begin the prayer. This is the traditional posture for thanksgiving and praise in Jewish-Christian experience. Then the priest says: The Lord be with you. The rest respond: and also with you. The greeting is not: have a happy day, or a good day. The greeting is mutual, is biblical, and is intimately rooted in the Lord. I wish you the Lord because he is at the center of our life, our heart, and our union as a community. His glorified, once crucified humanity embodies our way to God. He is the high priest who sustains our being now. The rest of the Assembly wishes that the Lord be with the presider.

The presider, with a gesture of uplifted hands, says: lift up your hearts. The rest respond: We lift them up to the Lord. Notice that the seat of affective prayer is the heart (which might be why we have devotion to the sacred heart, not sacred intellect/head of Jesus). The gesture and the dialogical exchange begin with our bodies, but get lifted up towards a transcendent reference.

Finally the presider says: let us give thanks to the Lord our God. The rest respond: it is right to give him (i.e, God) thanks and praise. The purpose of prayer is thanks and praise. This mutual exchange states that the purpose of the Assembly's prayer is to give thanks and praise to God for creation and redemption (i.e., for being liberated from sin).

The presider then continues: it is right and fitting that we give you, O God, thanks and praise through Jesus Christ our Lord, or we give you thanks and praise for your presence and action in the world. It is fitting and right (vere dignum et justum est; hence the prayer that spilled out from the opening dialogue was called the vere dignum in older manuscripts of eucharistic prayers).

The eucharistic prayer is the whole Assembly's prayer. It is not the presider's prayer. The presider is the Assembly's public pray-er and voices the prayer for all. Because it seems long, because there are not a lot of dialogical exchanges between priest and people throughout the prayer, because only the priest continues to stand while the rest kneel (a posture that stresses awe and personal interiority over communal and active engagement), it is hard to experience and appreciate the corporate nature of the prayer.