“After having tasted
and experienced in the Gospel how sweet the Lord is, how faultless His
doctrine, how good and refreshing His consolations and promises, the heart of the priest overflows with happiness and joy, and he kisses
the words of eternal life, in order to testify his profound reverence, his
great and ardent love for them. This liturgical kiss, therefore,
expresses what is contained in the verses of the Psalm: "More to be desired than gold and many precious stones are the words
of the Lord; and sweeter than honey and the honeycomb. Greatly purified by fire
is Thy word, O Lord, and Thy servant is exceedingly pleased therewith. Yes, I
love Thy Commandments more than gold and precious stones ; they are the delight
of my heart ; in my exile, they have become to me a canticle. I opened my mouth
and I sighed; for I long for Thy Commandments." "What the world values most is
threefold: riches, whose principal representative and symbol is gold; beauty,
represented by precious stones; and pleasure, symbolized by the honeycomb. Yet
nothing of all that the earth can bestow is comparable to the joy and
refreshment imparted by the word of God" (Reischl). The Gospel bestows
that heavenly wisdom of which Solomon says : "I preferred her before
kingdoms and thrones, and esteemed riches nothing in comparison of her. Neither
did I compare unto her any precious stone: for all gold, in comparison to her,
is as a little sand, and silver in respect to her shall be counted as clay. I
loved her above health and beauty, and chose to have her instead of light; for
her light cannot be put out" (Wisdom 7, 8 10).
If the Gospel is taken into the heart and preserved therein,
with all that esteem and submission, love and joy, which the kissing of the
book denotes, then is the Gospel also able "to blot out our sins." It
is self-evident that no such power of effacing sin may be ascribed to the words
of the Gospel, as is peculiar to the forms of the Sacraments of Baptism and
Penance: they are only a kind of Sacramental in a more general sense and have,
therefore, assuredly a great power of awakening and promoting that disposition
of soul by which venial sins are effaced, or which prepares for and renders one
worthy of receiving the Sacraments. The word of God, which is
accompanied by the interior working of grace, exercises a redeeming, healing
and sanctifying influence on man when he is properly disposed, by exciting
faith, hope and charity, fear and contrition, conversion and amendment of life. It
is not only a powerful means of clearing the soul of the excrescence of sin and
imperfection, but it possesses, moreover, other beneficial effects besides. "Are not My words as a fire, saith the
Lord, and as a hammer that breaketh the rock in pieces?" (Jer.
23, 29.) Yea, the words of the Lord are spirit and life: they are powerful,
two-edged, penetrating. When Christ on the road to Emmaus "opened"
the meaning to the two disciples of "the Scriptures, their hearts burned
within them." The word of God has a marvelous power for enlightening the
eyes, for imparting wisdom to the lowly and the humble, for rejoicing the heart
and refreshing the soul. In like manner, may the living and quickening word of
God, which abides forever, impart to us "salvation and protection," *
may it purify, consecrate and sanctify our souls ever more and more. For
"the Gospel is the power of God unto salvation to every one that belie
veth" (Rom. i, i6)."
This exerpt was taken from The Holy Sacrifice of the Mass: Liturgically, Dogmatically and Ascetically Explained by Fr. Nicholas Gihr. It is well worth the read!
I would only further note that to clense Isaiah, God sent an angle to put a burning coal on his tongue. So to, when the Gospel is kissed the priest is cleansed to go forth and proclaim the Gospel to the nations (The left side of the Altar represents the nations
See this for more)
“I have been asked to
explain something about myself which seems to be regarded as very
extraordinary. The problem has been presented to me in the form of a cutting
from a very flattering American article, which yet contained a certain
suggestion of wonder. So far as I can understand, it is thought extraordinary
that a man should be ordinary. I am ordinary in the correct sense of the term;
which means the acceptance of an order; a Creator and the Creation, the common sense of gratitude for
Creation, life and love as gifts permanently good, marriage and chivalry as
laws rightly controlling them, and the rest of the normal
traditions of our race and religion. It is also thought a little odd that I
regard the grass as green, even after some newly-discovered Slovak artist has
painted it grey; that I think daylight very tolerable in spite of thirteen
Lithuanian philosophers sitting in a row and cursing the light of day; and
that, in matters more polemical, I
actually prefer weddings to divorces and babies to Birth Control. These
eccentric views, which I share with the overwhelming majority of mankind, past
and present, I should not attempt to defend here one by one. And I only give a
general reply for a particular reason. I wish to make it unmistakably plain
that my defense of these sentiments is not sentimental. It would be easy to
gush about these things; but I defy the reader, after reading this, to find the
faintest trace of the tear of sensibility. I hold this
view not because it is sensibility, but because it is sense."
