A friend and I went to Binondo looking for cheap sportswear. I haven’t been to this part of town for the longest time. I was looking forward to once again riding the rusty rickety tin can pedal-powered tricycles littering every street corner like famished flies that skillfully darted between alleys, cars and pedestrians.
Our first stop was Binondo Church to greet our Lord and say a Rosary before the La Japonesa. My companion explained this was the image of our Lady before which St. Lorenzo Ruiz, the first Filipino saint, entrusted his missionary trip that was rewarded with martyrdom in Japan.
After this visit, we hailed one of the tricycles to shuttle us to one of the many colossal wholesale stores. It was hard to squeeze into the vehicle. I had to literally exhale all the air in my lungs and stomach to miraculously fit inside the iron rib cage of a Jurassic-age dinosaur we could call Tricyclosaurus.
Being squeezed inside a prehistoric sardine can didn’t really give one a good view of the outside. The most we could see were deformed reflections on the doors of the taller vans and buses. Every now and then a squid of a jeep would manage to overtake and squirt us with a jet of polluted black smoke ink.
“Do you realize that this is Heaven here on earth?” My companion suddenly said out of the blue.
“Huh?” I didn’t quite understand where he was coming from since I was still choking from the smoke.
“Look at all these stickers,” he pointed at the rattling panel before us.
Perhaps I was too absorbed with trying to get a view of the outside that I wasn’t too attentive with the inside. Indeed, my companion’s description was so precise: it was Heaven here on earth!
The rust-pocked panel was covered with religious stickers. There was our Lord, another of His Sacred Heart, our Lady of Lourdes, Fatima, Miraculous Medal, and then St. Joseph, Padre Pio of Pietrelcina, and angels of all sorts of colors and sizes.
My companion whisked out his smartphone and snapped a photo of the celestial kaleidoscope before our eyes.
* * *
This episode reminded me of a more sublime experience that eventually led to the conversion of a famous Protestant minister to the Catholic Faith: Scott Hahn. He shared how he one day, out of a healthy curiosity to understand early Christian Liturgy, sneaked into a Catholic chapel in Milwaukee. As the Mass progressed he could not help but be raptured by a ‘new and yet old’ discovery.
He writes, “In less than a minute, the phrase Lamb of God had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than twenty-eight times in twenty-two chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn’t ready for this, though — I was at Mass!” (The Lamb’s Supper)
Reading on the early Christian writers, he learned that the connection between Revelation and the Mass was already common knowledge for the Fathers. He says: “[The Fathers] considered the Book of Revelation the key to the liturgy, and the liturgy the key to the Book of Revelation. (…) I had been trying to make sense of the Book of Revelation as some kind of encoded message about the end of the world. (…) Now, after two weeks of daily Mass attendance, I found myself wanting to stand up during the liturgy and say, ‘Hey, everybody. Let me show you where you are in the Apocalypse! Turn to chapter four, verse eight. You’re in heaven right now.’” (Ibid.)
The miniature Heaven that my companion and I contemplated inside the tricycle is also present in the Mass. But this time, not as mere stickers, but as real celestial figures who participate in every single Mass that is celebrated here on earth.
We read in the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium the following words:
“In the earthly liturgy we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. With all the warriors of the heavenly army we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them.”
Scott Hahn amusingly but profoundly reflects on these very words of the Council by concluding: “That’s heaven. No, it’s the Mass. No, it’s the Book of Revelation. Wait a minute: it’s all of the above.” (Ibid.)
May all these help us to realize and value the fact that every Mass is already “heaven here on earth!”