Understanding Our Faith

‘Taking’: The Presentation of the Gifts

The Presentation of the Gifts, or as it is sometimes called, the Offertory Procession, is not an addition to the Mass but is an integral part of it. And it is a part of the Mass which involves what the whole congregation is at Mass to do. Unfortunately, it has often been seen as a way of just getting people to do something at Mass. I would like to deepen and broaden our understanding of what we are doing when those people take the bread and wine to the altar and the priest takes the bread and wine from them. In fact, I would like to spend several weeks in this column teasing out the importance of the Presentation of the Gifts.

Bread and Wine

Firstly, I would like to draw out the meaning of taking bread to the table of Christ and to do this, we need to ponder on the place of bread (food) in our ordinary everyday lives. Bread is often used as a stand in to represent all of our food. We can see this in such phrases as ‘earning our bread by the sweat of our brow’.

Food is of course radically important for human life even if we don’t spend much time reflecting on it. But as the common saying puts it ‘if we don’t eat, we die’! Every time we eat, we are saying in our very action that we cannot keep ourselves alive. We are dependent on something outside of ourselves to remain alive. The very fact that we have to eat, proclaims our dependence on something beyond ourselves in order to exist!

We do not have a complete hold on our own lives. We can lose them; they can slip out of our hands. We have received the lives we have; they have been given to us and those from whom we have directly received them – our parents – do not themselves have an absolute hold on their lives, but have in their turn received them.

So, to bring bread to the altar of the Lord is to recognize that we have received the life we have, that it is indeed ours but as it is so as a gift. As precious as it is, we are dependent on others for it and surely we gave thanks for it.

We as believers, bring this bread to the One whom we recognize as the One who has given us this life that we have. We go beyond just being aware that we are dependent on ‘something’ outside of ourselves to stay alive and we recognise that God is the One from whom all life comes.

We recognize this by bringing before God, the thing which day by day keeps us alive. This bread, this food, is more precious than all the riches of the earth; it is God’s gift keeping us alive.

And so, when the priest takes the bread from the people who bring it to the altar, he says: “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made.” And we all answer “Blessed be God forever”.  

There is more to be said about bread and about our action of presenting it at the altar as we move on through the coming weeks.

Fr Frank O’Loughlin

30 May 2025