The Priest's Craft: Mass

We shall talk today about the work of a priest in the Liberal Catholic Church, of the particular nature of that work, why it is somewhat different from that in other Churches, and what the special powers and possibilities are that we have as priests. There is great value in the method of work represented by the Church in that, in the first place, it is very impersonal.

One of the common criticisms often launched against Catholic Churches is that its methods are personal, and that it is dominated by the craft of its priests. If you look into the matter sensibly, you will find that the basis on which the work is founded, in our Church at any rate, is actually more free from domination than in the case of the Protestant Churches.

If you knew the amount of work done by the Roman Catholic priests, listening for hours to numbers of people's confessions, you would know that the priest has too much to do to dominate people through confession. But putting all that aside, there is a great element of impersonality in the Catholic form of worship.

In the Protestant Churches you are under the domination of the minister, especially when you have extemporaneous prayer, as the minister is putting his own thoughts into it.

In our Church there is a set form of worship. The priest is disguised as much as possible, and he is obliterated to a great extent, so far as his personality is concerned. His very vestments have that effect: they represent the Office and change him out of recognition from his secular self. The personality is quite hidden, and only the office remains. It is really very impersonal -- much less personal, in fact, than in the Protestant form of worship.

There is another side to the work, which makes it impersonal in that it is done, not so much through the spiritual power developed individually by the priest, as in the power of the Christ that flows through him by reason of his ordination. By working through the Church as an institution, and using it as a means for helping people spiritually, for lifting people up, you are able to work in an impersonal way.

You do not have to attract them to yourself personally as you do along other lines. You work with the power and blessing of the Lord flowing through His Church and through the Sacraments, and you use that as the means for lifting people up. In this Center it has avoided those fractions and jealousies that you get when working along other lines. In a Center such as we have here it is extraordinarily valuable because it is a standing object lesson for the people, something impersonal with boundless possibilities of greatness, so that little personal quarrels and piques are seen to be small in comparison with the uplifting power of the Church. It seems to me that the methods of our Church are such a safe line of development and progress for people. There is always a certain amount of danger in pushing people; they are apt to fly off at a tangent with too much pressure. You can only change people gradually, and rather slowly; at any rate, where consciousness has to express itself through the physical body. If you try to change it rapidly, you are liable to get nervous strains and stresses, leading to unbalance to strange mental states and sudden changes of idea. In this method of the Church you have a singularly happy way of doing things, because you get people in a more or less impersonal attitude. We try to teach people to cease to think of themselves and to think of the great ideas put before them in the symbolism of the Eucharist more as offering worship, and not in the terms of self-interest or self-gratification; but rather identifying themselves with the larger consciousness.

If you pause for a moment to consider what takes place during an ordinary celebration of the Holy Eucharist, it is a very wonderful thing. The service lasts anything from half an hour to two hours, and during all that time you have people working at the highest level they can touch. Sometimes they relax, but it is the highest they are able to maintain. Generally speaking, they are working at a higher level than in ordinary life, higher than in the outside world; they are thinking of things which are the most important in life and for a long period of time.

When you have a lot of people so working together, there is less of self-interest in their point of view. They are working as a body, as a collectivity, and they get more and more into the habit of working as one body.

If you pause for a moment to realize that, you will see what an enormously good training that is. You get them less in tune with a sense of fellowship with one another, and you can carry them up into a form of collective consciousness; they get new horizons and they see things from a point of view larger than before.

It is obviously a very great thing you are able to do; to carry them out of the prison of the separated consciousness into that larger consciousness in which we come to sense the One Life. There is no doubt that the trend in modern times is towards cooperation and working together, to group consciousness, and in religion we are moving towards that time in the Seventh Race when we shall have a kind of spiritual anarchy, when there will be few rules and regulations because people will have become so spiritually developed, and have the basis of spiritual unity, so that the inner attitude will make its own rules, and they will not be so dependent upon outer authority.

There is nothing, I think, really more important than the gaining of this recognition of the One Life, which is the recognition of brotherhood. You can make excuses for people, but you can never understand people really until you realize that oneness of consciousness in the divine Life. The antagonism that we feel comes, not from the life, but from the bodies we have brought up from the past lives.

The difficulties we have in life, our hates, quarrels and disputes, are only when the ape or the bear or the tiger is prominent; but when our consciousness is raised, all that drops off. We do not have difficulties when our consciousness is at the higher levels, but when it is in those personalities which are at war with each other. So the solution to the difficulties and disputes is found when we gain the consciousness of that one divine Life, and it seems to me that the Church is a magnificent way to bring people up to that.

The Church is a purifying influence. Your thought is carried up to a higher level, so you become more responsive to spiritual influences. The inspiration of our service is the power through the Sacraments, working with the angels, that tends to induce higher modes of consciousness time after time, and familiarizes you with those higher modes of consciousness.

You get a sense of happiness and bliss (you know the Eastern saying that "Brahman is bliss"). Spiritual upliftment is reproduced by the services; and then we get inspired with the idea of producing that experience by our own self-initiated efforts from within that which the power has awakened within us. And growing more accustomed to it, we find we can more or less produce those modes of consciousness for ourselves from within.

What Is Really Going On At Mass

When we are speaking of stepping down truth. You have the power of Christ in the Host, but it is on too high a level for use and in the service you have an arrangement for bringing down the power. Just as you step down electricity by means of voltage. We have got to step down truth; it has got to be put into terms that the uneducated can reach. People at all levels have to have the truth brought down to them, and we are told that the great Teachers give the truth to the people in the form that is needed at the time. They could not give it in its full splendor and purity. We have to try to lift ourselves out of our normal level of consciousness to a higher level and sometimes you step truth down so that you may step people up to a higher conception of things. We step truth down or step force down, in the Church because we are dealing with the world at large. We have people of different types and temperaments to deal with, some more or less primitive, some more advanced; some intellectual and some emotional there is enormous diversity. In the Church you have a wonderful scheme in which the teaching is brought down to all levels. Some people object to the Communion because it is a materialization of spiritual truth; some people say it is only by the working of faith in our hearts and spiritually that we take the blood and body of Christ. It all comes from the doctrine that matter is evil and not as holy as spirit. Matter is just as important as spirit. The remedy is to spiritualize our views of matter. It you receive the blessing of the Christ through the Host, you make of matter a vehicle for the spirit.

There is a tremendous radiation of power through the service of the Church, which goes out on all levels. You need not consider that a person is bound by what he is doing. If I use a typewriter to convey my meaning I am not bound by my typewriter.

If I make use of a car, or a train, or a steamer I do so in order to make my work more effective, but you do not say that I am bound by them. Therefore, if you decide to work through the ceremonies of the Church, it does not mean that you are bound by them and cannot work without them.

I think it is necessary to have a definition of what ceremonial is and what it is we do. I would define it as the intelligent use of forms that they may be the best expression of the life. The ceremonialist uses them to get the best effect for his purposes.

You would be surprised to know what an enormous amount of work is done by a Center like this one. Once I was doing an Ordination in Sydney and Bishop Leadbeater was telling me of the effect on the inner planes. On the buddhic plane the power went up to an enormous distance and even on the etheric level to a place some miles away.

The power from this church goes out to tremendous distance, and there are all sorts of arrangements with angels by which the power is distributed. The master told me that Holland was once the center of spiritual life for Europe. The amenities are preserved here, there is very little yellow press, and they have a tradition for standing for peace. Holland is a spiritual reservoir from which the forces are distributed to different parts of Europe. I only want to assure you that by using the Church in this way, with people who are trained in control of their bodies, who have also some degree of realization of the higher consciousness, you can do an enormous work for the helping of the world around you. If there were many such centers in the world, how very much could be done to change the whole aspect of the thought of this world.

It is a very good thing to take steps in physical world to bring about changes -- to have conferences and for people to come together to discuss things, and so on, -- but what is much more essential is spread the ideal thought, and to have that ideal thought very strong and definite in order that it may be very potent for influencing other people. I think the future of this Church is largely connected with that kind of work, largely because of infiltration of that kind of thought. Gradually these ideas come to permeate other Churches, and you will find that the current of religious thoughts flow in that direction. The same remarks apply to Masonic bodies. It is necessary to get people together and send out those forces into the higher worlds. The Masters once said that the best way in which people could help Them was in bringing others to Them; and one of the most effective way of helping people is by taking those steps in spiritual life which make us more effective channels of Their influence. You make citizens of the world, and set up the desire to be peaceful within them. That is the only way to bring about permanent peace, when you awaken the real passion for peace and brotherhood and the recognition of the One Life.