It’s hard for any relationship to work if you are not present to the other person, at least some of the time. That said, even if someone is there physically right in front of you, they can absent mentally or spiritually. You want them actually to be present to you, in the sense that they are attentive and engaged with you, and not with their minds and affections elsewhere. Even more, you want them not just to be present to you but to be withyou, for you.

Four times during Mass, the priest greets the congregation with the words: “The Lord be with you.” And the people respond, “And with your spirit.” It’s a very ancient greeting in the Church and in the worship of the Church. The word Church means the gathering together of those who have been called by God. He calls, we gather. He doesn’t call us in the first place to be with one another, to be present to one another, but to be with Him, to be present to and for Him and, through Him, with and to one another. Even more wonderfully, He calls us not just to be with Him, attentive to Him, but to enter into communion in His life and love. He calls us to be in Him.

So, that exchange of greeting between priest and people places us within the orbit, the presence of the Lord. It is a wake-up call, to be awake to the astounding reality of the presence of the Holy Trinity here and now; to be actively aware that in this consecrated place the Three-in-One who consecrates all things and all people desires to renew us in His life and love; and to do this through the celebration of the sacrifice of the Cross. “The Lord be with you … and with your spirit” gathers us together around the foot of the Cross and the throne of God. By the same token, it is also a call to leave aside for the time we are here in His liturgical presence our awareness of the things of the world and of our own concerns and other priorities. The Lord calls us out of ourselves, away from our life in this world, to be present to Him and to what He is doing for us and with us in this sacred assembly. For at Mass, we are not passive spectators but active participants. Christ gathers us up into the exaltation of the Cross and to the right hand of the Father. He renews for us gathered here the mystery of His suffering, death and resurrection.

Like Our Lady, our basic attitude of mind, heart and body is to be actively receptive to what the Lord desires to give us, and to do with us, at this particular Mass, in this particular moment of our lives. Mary listened attentively to the Word spoken to her from God. She engaged with it and reacted to it using her intelligence, conscious of the practical demands being made of Her. When she speaks her “fiat”, “let it be done to me according to your word”, she then receives the Body of Christ through the power of the Holy Spirit. We, too, at Mass, are present to the Word, and are called to do as Mary did: to engage and react to it with intelligence and practical wisdom, to assent to it and, in the power of the Spirit which our assent unleashes, to receive the Holy Eucharist and to make Christ incarnate in our lives.

Aware of our tendency to get distracted, the Rite of the Mass keeps calling us back to be present to the Holy Trinity. The opening “the Lord be with you” is repeated a first time prior to the Gospel, the most important Word we will hear at Mass. It is then repeated a second time at the beginning of the Eucharistic Prayer, and added to it are two other exhortations to strengthen it: “lift up your hearts”, as if to focus us completely on heaven; and “let us give thanks to the Lord our God”, which is our first reaction to the presence of God once our hearts are lifted up. And the third and final repetition is before the final blessing of the Mass when we are commissioned to go and bring all we have been given at Mass into our lives. The Mass has opened up to us what is going on in heaven, where Jesus continually offers His Body and Blood to the Father for our salvation; the Mass has swept us up into the life and activity of heaven. And as we leave Mass to go back to our earthly lives, the Holy Spirit drives and inspires us to bring the power of the Word and the grace and strength we have received back to earth.

So, that greeting, “the Lord be with you” is far more than some sort of holy alternative to “good morning.” It is setting the scene for the greatest encounter of presence and of love possible this side of eternity, the celebration of the Mass. It’s perhaps akin to the trumpet call that we will hear at the end of time when Christ returns openly and gloriously. At Mass, He comes with the saints and angels, with the Father and the Spirit, and with the holy souls. The greeting could almost be, “the Lord is coming now to be with you”, and our response could be, “and may He also come to be with your spirit.” His coming to us at Mass is real, more real than our own coming to Mass. There’s nothing more real than Christ. Yes, His coming and presence are hidden behind the veil of Word and Sacrament, but the eternal Mass or liturgy of heaven is truly present just the same. The heavenly Mass and our earthly Mass are not two different realities, but the same reality in two different forms. At the end of time, only the heavenly Mass will abide. Then, we will realize in the depths of our being that the Mass we have participated in actively and attentively here below was but a share in the liturgy of eternity and was our preparation for it.

This is why prayerful and careful preparation for Mass, and active and devout participation in it, are so important, so evident. As the hymn says, “be still, for the presence of the Lord is moving in this place.” There is no single more important or effective thing a Church community can do than to enter into the celebration of Mass, especially with the believing attitudes of the Virgin Mother: a heart as free from sin as possible, an attentive ear, true humility and a ready obedience. If we prepare as best we can, asking Her help, we will give the Spirit of God the space to incarnate Christ in our very being as we eat His flesh and drink His blood. We will experience in truth that the Lord is with us and that we are with Him. We will come to realize that the Mass is not part of our lives, but that our lives are part of the Mass; they are an offering of self-sacrificing love in gratitude to the One who poured Himself out in love on the Cross so that we might live for ever, that is, become divine.