Silence Before and After Mass

“Before Mass we can show up early to prepare our hearts for the holy sacrifice in prayer. After Mass we have the opportunity to stay for 5-10 minutes in silence and prayer to give thanks to God and to praise Him”

All throughout salvation history Worship of God has always been tied to a particular place that was set aside and in this sense made Holy. In Creation, the Garden of Eden, and thus all of the world that man had received as a gift from his creator was the place that was set aside to worship and be in right relationship with God.

As time continued, after Israel gained freedom from Egypt, they were asked every time they stopped while they were wandering in the wilderness to pitch the Tent of Worship. Inside the Tent of Worship, there was front and center, the “Holy of Holies”, the place where the Ark of the Covenant dwelled and thus the Israelites believed it to be the very presence of God. Now, for the Israelites there were certain rituals one had to perform to enter the Tent of Worship and they had to obey the law to ensure that they were ritually clean. What was at the heart of these different actions and laws was ensuring that the Tent of Worship continued to be a place set aside and made holy so that it could be a proper place and space for worship of the one true God.

In our time, in the age of the church, Jesus Christ has established a new "tent of worship" and a new temple in His own body. The place where His body dwells, and thus where we worship, is in every Catholic Church around the world. Though being in a state of grace -a gift given at baptism and renewed by confession after grave sin- is all that is required to enter the assembly of worship and to receive our Lord in the Eucharist, there are other ways that we make this place of worship Holy and set it aside.

To set it aside and make it holy means that it is not treated like every other place or space that we enter. It is a place of mystery and encounter with the Trinitarian God. One way we set aside and make it holy for this encounter is through silence. Silence when we enter the church is something that all of us should seek to cultivate in practice. Before Mass we can show up early to prepare our hearts for the holy sacrifice in prayer. After Mass we have the opportunity to stay for 5-10 minutes in silence and prayer to give thanks to God and to praise Him in our hearts for the great gift of the Eucharist.

Silence is one of the key ways that we set aside the space in our church to make it holy, and will change the way that we approach the Eucharist and the Holy Sacrifice. Through silence in the church, especially before and after Mass, we recognize in our hearts in a physical way the presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist and we give him the freedom to communicate freely and lovingly with us.