Dear Saints,

The Preface for the Mass of Pentecost Sunday is remarkable, and I’d like to share it with you.

What’s a preface, you ask? To situate it for you, a Mass’ preface comes immediately before the Eucharistic Prayer. The dialog that gets the Preface going includes, "Lift up your hearts. R. We lift them up to the Lord.”

Prefaces are usually seasonal, but some feasts of real significance (Trinity Sunday, Corpus Christi, All Saints, etc.) have their own particular prefaces. Pentecost is one of them — let’s give it a look:

For, bringing your Paschal Mystery to completion, you bestowed the Holy Spirit today
on those you made your adopted children
by uniting them to your Only Begotten Son.
This same Spirit, as the Church came to birth,
opened to all peoples the knowledge of God
and brought together the many languages of the earth in one profession of the one faith.

Beautiful, no? Let me offer a couple of thoughts for further reflection.

We see from the preface that God, in bestowing the Holy Spirit, unites the Apostles (and us) to Jesus and so makes them (and us) His adopted children. Further, the Church is born at Pentecost. It is the Church that, in faith, receives "the knowledge of God," and makes this knowledge available to all peoples.

Also of note is that the prayer is given in two sentences. These parts refer to the two essential aspects of Christian life: Communion and Kingdom (also known as Holiness and Justice or Worship and Mission or Prayer and Love).

In the Peace of the Risen Christ,

Father Daniel

δοῦλος Χριστοῦ Ἰησοῦ