Pearls of Great Price

Many years ago my wife, Nancy, created this mixed-media creation. She calls it, Sunday Morning at Mass. It’s placed prominently in my prayer room. I’ve studied it and contemplated it many, many times over the years. I wrote this essay a few years ago after one particular contemplation. Here it is again in case you missed it:

Sunday Morning at Mass

A mixed-media creation by Nancy Maffeo

But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed. (Isaiah 53:5) 

No one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway. The priest – an ordinary man given an extraordinary privilege – holds bread and wine aloft, speaks a prayer of consecration, and the Holy Spirit supernaturally changes them into the body and blood, soul and divinity of our God-who-took-the-form-of-Man. The fancy word for the change is transubstantiation.

No, no one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway. During the Mass, mortal time intersects with eternal time, a time in which time does not exist; certainly not as we understand time. And we are there, at the whipping post, two thousand years ago – as we count time. His blood oozes from strips of flesh laid open across his back and arms and legs and buttocks, sliced open by a Roman whip. 

Blood drops to the pavement at His feet.  

 No one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway. God-in-the-flesh carries the cross laid across His bloodied shoulders. Soldiers push Him along the Via Dolorosa, flogging Him again and again. Mocking Him. Spitting at Him. 

And more of His blood drops onto the pavement. 

 No one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway. He stops at the top of Gogotha's hill. Soldiers throw Him down onto the cross, grab His hands and feet and hammer spikes into them.


No one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway. But at each Mass the faithful can follow with their eyes of faith the drops of blood, like pearls of great price, glistening along the path from whipping post to splintered cross, the path which only the God-Man could walk, which only the God-Man could transform from a place of death to a throne of life.

Eternal life.

No one sees it happening. Not with our natural eyes, anyway; But it happens at every Mass.