LAVABO,
SUSCIPE
SANCTA
TRINITAS
81
to you, somehow, the sense of having arrived; and on the top of that, the sense that there is going to be a meal before long. Now, in the Mass we are trying to put the dust of the world behind us for a bit, and going into a king's presence to share a royal banquet; we shouldn't feel comfortable about that if we hadn't at least made some gesture of preparing ourselves for it. Only a gesture, perhaps-after all, we don't always get quite all the ink off our hands before lunch, do we ?-but it's better than nothing. When we were talking about the priest's preparation, I was saying that it ought to make us feel shut off from the wicked world, shut in together in a cosy family party. And at the Lavabo I think this feeling ought to return to us, even more strongly. For this reason; in the primitive Church the catechumens, that is, the people who hadn't been baptized yet, but were learning to be Christians, were apprenticed to the job of being Christians, only stayed till half-way through the Mass; after the sermon they were turned out. From the Offertory onwards the 1\1.ass was to be entirely a family affair. It's true that under the modern discipline of the Church we don't turn non-Catholics away. But I tf.ink the positive side of that feeling ought to be with us still; as the priest goes to wash his hands we ought to be rather stimulated by the sense that this is our show; there is a business-like feeling in the air; if I may use a very indelicate comparison, it's like when somebody is going to fell a tree or something of that kind, and he spits on his hands as he faces up to it. Not that I would ever want any of you to do anything so unladylike; but when the priest washes his hands at Mass we might, I think, be
St. Edmund Campion Missal & Hymnal for the Traditional Latin Mass : C C WAT ER S H ED.ORG / C A M P ION