In the Diocese where I was ordained, one of the more cantankerous archdeacons reserved the right to teach all new priests how to celebrate Communion. We'd already been priested - most of us had said our first Mass at some point already but he started from the opinion that we'd done it badly. And so we were trundled up-Island for a weekend of browbeating. Apart from a morning spent poring over the Canons of the Diocese of British Columbia, we had to learn the various 'manual acts' - movements, gestures and hand positions - associated with the celebration of Holy Communion. One of these manual acts, of course, occurs at the epiclesis which appears, in our liturgy nowadays, as an element following the Eucharistic narrative (the story of what Jesus did and said when he took bread and wine at the last supper). The priest will place his hands over the elements with his thumbs interlocked and invoke the Holy Spirit over these gifts of bread and wine. I could have told the archdeacon that I knew all about that. I had already gotten quite a fright at that moment in the service at the Church of St John the Evangelist in Montreal during my training.


I was the subdeacon there for a while (looking vaguely like a scruffy young hippy who'd been mugged by angry sacristans and dressed up in a tunicle but that's another story) and it was my role to stand to one side of Father Slattery as he celebrated Mass, be prepared to remove the pall from atop the chalice at the appropriate moment, genuflect when he genuflected and to raise the edges of his chasuble during the Elevation. It was all new to me - the churches of my youth had been nothing like this and I wasn't yet convinced. That is, until we got to a point in the liturgy one Sunday morning where Father Slattery placed his hands with interlocked thumbs over the open chalice (unlike the illustration above where there is a pall covering the chalice).

St John the Evangelist in Montreal was, at one time, sinking into the mud. Cracks had begun to appear in some of the masonry as a result of the shifting foundations and questions emerged as to whether the building would survive the slow sink into the ground. Then they built the Metro - Montreal's subway system - in 1967. The line ran right under St John the Evangelist and the structural work managed to prop up the building to such a point that any further slippage was unlikely.

Father Slattery had just gotten to a particular point in the liturgy where he spread his hands over the elements on the altar when a train ran under the church. Things are more connected than we might think and the vibrations ran up from the train to the structure of the tunnel to the foundations of the church and to the altar and all that sat upon it. The clear mirror-like surface of the Communion wine rippled. I said to myself 'My God, it's true'.

Years later I am able to explain all this with recourse to the physics mentioned above. I do, however, still find myself filled with awe and expectation that God honours those particular moments in time when dumb things are presented to him with a reasonable hope that he will change and animate them.

And I will never forget at which particular point in the Mass that hope is expressed most clearly - almost defiantly - in words that beg some immediate answer.