By JAMES MONTI
Readers familiar with this column know that we have addressed the topic of kneeling more than once over the years. As this posture of worship is such a foundational element in expressing our relationship with God, it certainly deserves some further considerations, and in particular, the role of kneeling and genuflection in our worship of the Most Holy Eucharist.
When God first formed Adam from the dust of the Earth, He gave him in his bodily form the ideal means of humbling himself before his Creator, two knees with which to lower himself down to the dust from which he was made and present himself to the Lord. When man humbles himself before God, he loses nothing but rather gains everything: “Humble yourselves before the Lord and He will exalt you” (James 4:10).
In the proper and reverent celebration and adoration of the Holy Eucharist, a key relationship is established between our God upon the altar and ourselves. It is a relationship that sets our Lord above us and us below Him. A traditional high altar situates the Tabernacle as the apex of the sanctuary and of the entire church. At the consecration, the priest elevates first the Host and then the chalice up and above everyone present, including himself. And during Eucharistic adoration, the Blessed Sacrament is exposed in a monstrance which is designed to meet our upward gaze, all the more so when the monstrance is enshrined upon the special pedestal designed for it and fittingly named the “Tabor.”
All the above aspects of setting our Lord in the Holy Eucharist as visually elevated above us in His sacred sanctuary are steeped in the biblical imagery of God upon His holy mountain, echoing the theophanies of Mount Sinai and Mount Tabor and the enthronement of God in His holy temple upon Jerusalem’s Mount Zion.
This setting of our Lord in the sanctuary by its very nature summons us to that fundamental orientation of Catholic worship, ad orientem, the turning of oneself to the East, toward the Lord, the direction from which we expect Him to approach us at His Second Coming in glory.
Yet there is a second component of the Parousia that our sanctuaries also give witness to. Our Lord will not only be coming from the East; He will likewise be “coming on the clouds of Heaven” (Matt. 26:64), coming from above. Hence the enthronement of the Holy Eucharist above us in the Tabernacle and the priest’s elevation of the Holy Eucharist above our eyes at the consecration and when he blesses us with the monstrance at Benediction serve to foreshadow that glorious day when He will come “on the clouds of Heaven.”
The God-Given Remedy
In this encounter with God, there needs to be a commensurate response from us, a response that both professes our faith and expresses our love. Our Lord told Nicodemus, “And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of man be lifted up, that whoever believes in him may have eternal life” (John 3:15).
This lifting up of which our Lord speaks is first and foremost that of His being lifted up on the cross, but it also testifies to that lifting up that we can personally witness with our own eyes every day, the lifting up of the Sacrament of His Passion and death, the Holy Eucharist. For the people of Israel, the sight of the bronze serpent mounted on a pole was the God-given remedy for the deadly bite of the seraph serpents in the desert. For us, the sight of Christ raised high above us on the cross and in the Blessed Sacrament is the God-given remedy for the bite of the infernal serpent of Hell, the Devil.
Repeatedly our Lord links this lifting up of which He speaks to the recognition and profession of who He is, to the recognition and profession of His divinity: “When you have lifted up the Son of man, then you will know that I am he” (John 8:28). Moreover, by this lifting up on the cross and in the Holy Eucharist, our Lord will exercise a magnetic pull upon the hearts of men: “. . . .and I, when I am lifted up from the Earth, will draw all men to myself” (John 12:32).
As St. John the Baptist was completing his mission as forerunner of the Messiah, he said of our Lord, “He must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). We too need to live these words. We need to do what we can that the Lord may “increase”; we must give Him the highest place in our churches and in our lives, and say of Him with John the Baptist, “Behold, the Lamb of God!” (John 1:36). As for ourselves, we like John need to “decrease”; we need to humble ourselves before God, lowering ourselves and making ourselves small and lowly before Him.
For as our Lord taught: “. . . go and sit in the lowest place…” (Luke 14:10); “Whoever humbles himself like this child, he is the greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matt. 18:4). The posture of kneeling is the perfect bodily expression of this “decrease” before the Lord, of this taking the lowest place and becoming little like a child before the Lord. John the Baptist beautifully alludes to the act of physically dropping down in humility at the feet of Christ when he says, “…he who is mightier than I is coming, the thong of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie…” (Luke 3:16).
The lowering of the body to the Earth, down to the dust from whence it came, also expresses the oblation of ourselves to God. This is denoted most strikingly in the rites of ordination and of religious profession, in which those giving themselves to the lifelong service of God totally prostrate themselves from head to foot. But even the simple act of kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament conveys something similar, telling God with our body that we love Him with all our hearts, with all our souls, with all our minds and with all our strength. To kneel before the Tabernacle is to tell God that we won’t hold back anything from Him. It is an act of total and unconditional surrender to Him, a happy surrender because we are surrendering ourselves into the loving hands of our merciful God.
There is something particularly wondrous and awesome about kneeling to receive our Lord in Holy Communion, whether at an altar rail or simply on the floor directly before the priest. Gazing upward at the Host in the priest’s hands, one experiences a deep sense of Christ descending from Heaven to save us and feed us, coming down to us as He promised: “This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that I man may eat of it and not die” (John 6:50). It echoes what we profess in the Nicene Creed: “For us men and for our salvation He came down from Heaven…” (The Roman Missal, copyright 2010 ICEL).
Much has been written about the history of kneeling and genuflection, something we have addressed in past essays. The bottom line is that kneeling is mentioned as a posture of worship in both the Old and the New Testaments (Solomon and St. Paul, respectively). One article I recently read concerning this topic asserts that in the early centuries of Christianity kneeling was essentially a posture only assumed by repentant public sinners, and not by the faithful in general.
Setting aside the historical question of whether this was really so or not, are we not in a better situation now wherein all the faithful acknowledge their sinfulness by kneeling than one in which only some public sinners acknowledged their guilt in this manner?
Faces To The Earth
Another claim that I ran across asserts that the earliest reference to kneeling for the consecration dates from 1201, observed by a papal legate in Cologne. Regardless of what might have been going on in Cologne, the problem with this assertion is that there are sources attesting the practice of kneeling during the consecration at a considerably earlier date. A ninth-century treatise on the Mass in the manuscript of Ireland’s Stowe Missal states quite clearly, “When is sung, ‘Jesus took bread,’ the priest bows himself down thrice…and the people kneel” (text in George Warner, ed., The Stowe Missal, volume 2, Printed Text, Henry Bradshaw Society, volume 32, London, Henry Bradshaw Society, 1915, pp. 37, 40).
Rubrics in the late eighth-century Frankish Roman Ordo 17 speak of the assisting clergy and the people bowing with “their faces to the Earth” just before the Roman Canon begins and remaining so until shortly before the end of the Canon, when the subdeacons are instructed to rise. To speak of rising from a posture of having one’s face “to the Earth” certainly seems to suggest that one is rising from a kneeling posture (Roman Ordo 17, in Msgr. Michel Andrieu, ed., Les Ordines Romani du haut moyen age, volume 3, SSLED 24 (Louvain, Spicilegium sacrum Lovaniense Administration, 1951, pp. 181-182).
No one could contest that humility is an essential Christian virtue. Have those who raise objections to the posture of kneeling ever considered where the word humility comes from? It stems from two Latin words — humilis, meaning low or small, and humus, meaning soil or earth. So even our word for the virtue of humility expresses a sense of lowering oneself down, down to the earth, and making ourselves small before the Lord. So how can anyone contend that standing is a better expression of humility than kneeling?
It is by falling on our knees before our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, before the Sacred Host, that our hearts will joyfully ascend to God, full of gratitude for this “Pearl of Great Price” (cf. Matt. 13:46) before our eyes. As our Lord has promised, “…he who humbles himself will be exalted” (Luke 14:11).
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