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Thank you for your interesting and, if I may say so, discerning thoughts.

What jumped out at me was the seeming equivalence between "repeated" and "perpetuated".

I am quite ready to be shown that I did not understand you in this. But I do not think the terms are equivalent. And, to be sure, I'm not sure that either applies to what I am trying to convey.

Let's hack through the underbrush together, shall we?

In my alleged mind, "repeated" means that there is more than one instance of a thing. The cat walked on my computer yesterday, and the son of a gun repeated that act today.

Perpetuate, in simple terms, has a kind of "Drawn out" sense. It's one thing, but it goes on and on. A "perpetual motion machine" would never stop. A perpetual calendar is a device designed so that it can tell the time (or the date) as long as there is time to tell. (And let us not pass the word "tell" without paying homage by remembering that a bank "teller" counts out money and gives an account, which involves sorting and collecting transactions into different groups and giving a "tally", and these Anglo-Saxon word-meaning clusters exactly -- or very nearly -- follow the cluster of which Logos is a member. -- and the family of "count" and "account" is in there as well.)

Now, we immediately deny the concept of repetition. It's "once for all", and no one would have it any different.

Perpetual is closer to what we mean, but it's not it, not exactly.

IN one sense, the Son has always and will always be reconciling the world to Himself and to God. He is the Word spoken when God SAID, "Let there be light." And at the end of time He hands everything to the Father.

In a more temporally confined sense, from the Annunciation to at least the Ascension, if not to the Pentecost, His whole life on earth and its immediate sequelae are redemptive. That he submitted to inhabit the womb of His mother, that He was passively squeezed through the birth canal, He through whom that egress and all things were made, that He ever perspired, that He had to labor for the breath he quickly and freely gave up, that he suffered being palpated by Thomas and ate a bit of fish and led them out to a mountain - subjecting Himself to the constraints of our time and space ... all these are redemptive.

But finally we come down to the Triduum sacrum and to the especially mysterious three hours during which He hung on the Cross. And these we all readily understand as the apex, the climax of His redemptive work.

This is forever true. On a particular day, from around noon to around three o'clock, He through whom the worlds were made obeyed the properties of matter and the law of gravity, all made through Him, and let them kill Him. It will never happen again. It does not need to happen ever again.

Are we together so far?

Now this is what we say. That event is fixed in history.

We do not, I think envision it as stretched out, and we have already emphatically repudiated the very idea of repetition.

But as you claim to be able (and I agree) to see that even as being applied in the conviction, repentance, and forgiveness of sin in a particular period or periods of an individual sinner's life ... THAT cross THERE and THEN "coming true" for this sinner here and now.... are we still together?

Then let me continue with the elipses ... so we claim even more. THAT thing THERE and THEN is "Accessed" on our altars (we think). The there and then thing does not so much come up to our present as it stays where it is and we go back to it.

Digression on Memory

many of us have had he experience in which a smell calls up or takes us back to a time when we were joyful or melancholic. And because of the smell, we see the time and we feel the feelings. It is as tough our now had become then.

Most parents know the heart-rending satisfaction of having a child spread his wings and leave the nest. The day beofre my kid left home we went to Northern Virginia, from which the airplane would take her away from us to California.

And we drove briefly through the seminary where I had worked and longed so much to be a clergyman in the Episcopal Church. This was in the Fall of 2002 and I left he Episcopal Church and what I had thought was my heart's desire 8 years earlier.

After we let our child go from us through airport security, after we said a Rosary in the airport chapel, as we drove home, suddenly I didn't know where I was or WHEN I was. I was my childs' "primary care giver" and becuase she had been very sick and we had been told she would die a horrible and protracted death, this was one of the most amazing jobs I ever had. And now it was over and she must increase and I must decrease.

And I had worked for the day when she would no longer need me. And now it was here. And I had seen (as I think) through the phoniness of the Episcopal Church and (rightly or wrongly) had given up my whole life for Jesus and obedience to Him.

And it was all too much.

Short moral to a tediously long and self-indulgent narrative: memory (anamnesis) is more powerful than we usually think it to be, and memory of loss is more powerful still. It makes the past present. It warps time, maybe not in terms of physical science, but in terms of our selves.

Corollary: To refer, as we "Real presence types often do, as some "theories of the Eucharist as "mere memorial" is sophomoric and blind. Watch a war widow at some memorial of war dead, and I DARE you to use the word "mere".

So I am saying that whatever we may happen to feel like at this or that celebration of the Mass, we are with the aid of the Holy Spirit, the Spirit of God who is Lord of Time and not it's subject. We are REALLY participating, in most important sense of the word "Really", in the past. We are in an event in which it no longer matters whether we are re-presenting (making present) the sacrifice of Calvary or Re-pasting ourselves.

It was one event, in one sense it was over and done with in about three hours. But one aspect of the miracle of the Mass, is that we are back then, or "back then" is now. I'm not sure it matters which is more precise.

Thus saith the high and lofty One that inhabiteth eternity, whose name is Holy," I dwell in the high and holy place, with him also that is of a contrite and humble spirit, to revive the spirit of the humble, and to revive the heart of the contrite ones.

God is at once here and now, and especially with the humble and contrite, And in the High and lofty place where time and place, there and then -- here and now, are "plastic", malleable, stretchable, foldable. We think, "that was then this is now," and God says, "Not so fast." he continues,"I will take the offering at the nine o'clock Mass, I will take it beyond time and place it on my altar. I will take your here and now and include it, fold it into the there and then of that hill of shame and death 1,975 years ago. YOU see time as a given, so that it's 'once' or 'for a long time' or 'over and over again.' I can make your 'Then' now or your 'now' then.

I hope what I have written is and can somehow not persuade you of our position but convey a little more of what that position is.