When God instructs Moses on the architecture of the tabernacle, he describes multiple curtains, or veils of fine linen, to be placed between the tabernacle and the various outer courts. The final veil, the one separating off holy of holies, was only breached once per year when the high priest entered to make the atonement sacrifice. St. Paul refers to this in his letter to the Hebrews. The full power of the covenant, the propitiatory, the mediation accomplished between God and man, it was all veiled. Unvarnished, the mystery was too much, a dangerous reality which no human could withstand.
In the New Covenant, the fire burns even closer to the surface, bonding us at the heart to Our Lord’s sacrificial love. This does not mean the veil is no longer needed. If Christ tore the veil of the temple at his death and becomes himself the temple and tabernacle, the priest and the sacrifice, thus making accessible perfect forgiveness and redemption, this doesn’t mean we now casually waltz into the holy of holies. Quite the opposite. Don’t stick your hand into the bonfire.
For this reason, the liturgy is a veil. Often this is symbolic – the haze of incense, the poetic language, Latin as a sacred language, the symbolic nature of the sacraments, and so on. But we also literally veil that which is sacred – the altar, tabernacle, and chalice. On Passion Sunday, even more veils are deployed.
I once heard a small child complaining to her mother upon entering the church on Passion Sunday that she didn’t like Mass anymore because the saints had disappeared. They looked like purple ghosts and she couldn’t fathom why we would treat them so disrespectfully. The saints she had made friends with had withdrawn from sight. Children, of course, are wise in spite of themselves, they’re always thinking, and the annoyance of that little girl is keen. The veiling causes the incarnational reality of the communion of saints to recede. The holy ones who have been given body through sacred art are now disembodied. And although, of course, they are thriving in Heaven even as we speak, we have lost our sensible connection to them. In order to be friends with someone, it is greatly helpful to physically be near them with regularity.
This is why Our Lord takes on flesh. He is extending his friendship. And it’s why the victory won at the Cross includes the redemption of the body. It isn’t merely a spiritual triumph; Our Lord restores the entirety of our being. Satan is the opposite; his way is destruction. His way is the boring, bland, de-personalization of sin and loss of identity through following the crowd. God’s way is to make you uniquely yourself, a soul expressive of its goodness in the beauty of physical form. Love is so powerful a reality that it simply must spring into the fullest version of itself. It must incarnate.
When the liturgy pulls back from this by veiling itself, it is drawing back from its fullest expression and we are confronted by the cost of love. If love incarnates, this dis-incarnation feels like an absence of love. But this temporary absence is, in fact, the very nature of love. It must bury itself, give everything it has for the beloved so as to redeem the entirety of the beloved. Our Lord had to physically die on the Cross so that he could seal the covenant.
The liturgy, as a communication of divine, immolated love, takes on physical form. Most purely and vitally in the Blessed Sacrament, the Real Presence of Our Lord veiled under the appearances of bread and wine, but it also embodies the love of Christ in its sheer physical beauty – chant, vestments, incense, artwork, the feel of the altar rail under your elbows, the feel of the kneeler on your knees, the sound of a hundred wiggling children like the sound of crickets on a summer night, like the sound of waves on the seashore.
The liturgy opens up a space. It tabernacles us. You may have heard the Mass described as a window to Heaven. I don’t think that’s quite right. It’s not a window into Heaven. It is Heaven. We aren’t into the fullness of Heaven yet, but nevertheless it is Heaven. It’s a difficult relationship to explain, that the Kingdom of God is already here but also not yet. It’s almost like the feeling of a newlywed couple who are perfectly in love. 50 years later, they are even more perfectly in love. It grows and grows, but always remains itself.
Perhaps that’s why the sight of veiled statues bothers us. It’s like the times when Our Lord withdrew into the wilderness and everyone would panic and chase him down. When Our Lord seems to move away from us, it feels as though a piece of Heaven is being held back.
Use this absence as motivation. It’s one thing for Heaven to be symbolically absent from our senses during the Passion. It’s another entirely to die and miss the actual reality of Heaven, to be deprived of the sight of God for all eternity because you gave up. The Church triumphant is on the march, upward and onward, and as she moves it is for us an invitation. Come and find us. Take another step closer to Heaven. Strengthen your faith. The saints, as always, are cheering us on.
These ritual liturgical shifts are laden with theology, for theology is nothing if not lived. Liturgical space is defined by what happens here – the Sacrifice. It’s the action, the Passion, what Our Lord does that makes his message real, the destruction of his body that recreates our bodies. The liturgy might be peaceful and unhurried, but it is remaking the world. It parts the veil, even if only temporarily, and functions as a resonance with the heartbeat of Christ, chiming and filling the atmosphere with his victory. Think of it like Satan hearing a churchbell and running away as fast as he can because that bell is a spiritual warrior summoning angelic hosts and consecrating the world. The air itself is brimming with Heaven.
Dom Gueranger points out that the Church refers to Lent as Christian warfare. All of Lent has been leading us to this day, and from here on into Holy Week. St. John observes, “Jesus hid himself.” He leaves behind the temple made with human hands and via death enters into the heavenly tabernacle fashioned by God alone. As we practice our spiritual disciplines, do battle with our sins, and deprive ourselves sensibly, Christ is beckoning us to follow him, to delve ever more deeply into his sacred heart, to catch fire. We follow him all the way to the Cross, there is no other path.
If the way is dark and veiled, this is because the reality on the other side is precious. If it seems strange, the manner of the liturgy, it is supposed to be strange. Percy Shelley, commenting on how poetry wraps itself in a veil, says, “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar…” Why? Because the “the great secret of morals is love; or a going out of our nature…” It’s the same with the poetic symbols of the liturgy. Its veiled strangeness is an unveiling, a stripping away of familiarity so that we see afresh that which we have taken for granted, the immortal love that is the beating heart of our existence. And falling before such a love, what can we do but return it with all that we are.
Pondus Meum Amor Meus 