One word has been devastating my spirit of late: “monster.” Too frequently this word is heard in civil discourse and political rhetoric as an identifier of human persons. Even when read off screen or paper, it has a quality that grates against the soul and seems unworthy of human speech.

In the Prayer Over the Offerings in today’s Mass, the Church prays: “…grant that, through this offering, we may do fitting homage to your divine majesty and, by partaking of the sacred mystery, we may be faithfully united in mind and spirit.”

A person who lives in the spirit of the Liturgy is spiritually molded into a Christ-actor in the world. Such a person immerses themself in the values the Liturgy expresses and enters with their entire being into the prayer of Jesus whose act of adoration and worship we are invited to share in.

Today’s Prayer Over the Offerings, then, is a school of humble acknowledgement of our creaturehood and dependence on the “divine majesty” to whom we owe “fitting homage.” When our relationship with God is rightly ordered, we value our fellow human beings rightly, realizing that we are in some fundamental way united with them—no better and no worse, but equally loved and sustained in life; honored to be fellow creatures who come from the hands and loving creative work of one Father, as a fellow member of the body of Christ, or potentially a fellow member in that body because of the Incarnation.

The Liturgy forms the personality, as Dietrich von Hildebrand reminds us, so that we “hear” words in their relation to value. “It is the spirit of the God-man that speaks to us in the Liturgy.” In his book Liturgy and Personality, he explores how “…the spirit embodied in the Liturgy, the spiritual molding of the man who lives in that spirit,” shapes a person’s personality. “The radical theocentrism of the liturgy,” Bishop Robert Barron states in his Foreword, “teases us sinners out of our native egocentrism and thereby prepares us to see even created values [think here, created persons who should be valued for themselves by their very existence] with fresh eyes.”

It is a reminder that the Liturgy is a school.

Through Christ himself and through us who enter that school, it is he who breathes new life into the world.

As we are formed in the Liturgy into other Christ’s, we do indeed begin to shine with light, his Light. Through our language and attitudes and worship and right standing with God and others, we can offer a world exhausted by power and aggression, the hope that the humble Christ is here, risen, alive, now, and victorious.

Every human person secretly longs to breathe his Name.

Quotations from Deitrich von Hildebran, Liturgy and Personality, Introduction.