Don’t drown out the angel choir; Angels: Day 354

St. John Chrysostom  looks around him in church, and all he sees are people talking about business and money. You’ve made the church no better than a barn, he says. Be quiet, and listen, and you’ll hear the choirs of angels.

We say that Christ has done great things, having made angels out of human beings; then, when we are called on to give account, and asked to show a proof from this congregation, our mouths are stopped. I’m afraid that, instead of angels, I might bring out pigs as if this were a pigsty, and horses mad with lust.

I know it pains you to hear this. But I’m not speaking against all of you, but against the guilty—or rather not even against them, if they wake up, but for them. Right now everything is lost and ruined, and the church has become nothing bet- ter than a stable of oxen, and a barn for donkeys and camels, and I go around looking for a sheep and can’t find it. Everyone’s kicking, like horses and wild asses, and they fill the place here with piles of manure—that’s what their conversation is like. If you could see the things spoken at each service, by men, by women, their words would look more unclean than that manure.

So I beg you to change this evil custom, so that the church may smell of ointment. But now, while we store up perfumes for the senses in the church, we take no trouble to scrub out and drive away the uncleanness of the mind. So what’s the use? We wouldn’t disgrace the church as much by bringing dung into it as we disgrace it by speaking such things one to another—about profits, about merchandise, about petty business deals, about things that are nothing to us, when there ought to be choirs of angels here, and we ought to make the church a Heaven, and to know nothing else but earnest prayers, and quiet listening. –St. John Chrysostom, Homily 88 on Matthew

IN GOD’S PRESENCE, CONSIDER . . .

Does my own behavior at Mass sometimes distract people from what’s really going on at the altar?

CLOSING PRAYER

Lord, when you are present in the bread and the cup on your all-holy altar, keep me in mind of the angels and archangels who surround me.

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