Do You Know What An Altar is?

In case you know what you like but maybe don’t know why, here is a great quote from the architect Geoffrey Webb, from his 1939 book The Liturgical Altar:

“The reason for [the Church’s] meticulous directions is to be found in the supreme importance which the Church attaches to the altar in her liturgy. Not only does she consider it the central focus of the whole liturgy, the raison d’être of the building in which its stands; not only does she indicate that the church exists for the altar, rather than the altar for the church; not only does she look upon it as the sacrificial stone, upon which Christ, our Priest and Victim, offers Himself daily in His Eucharistic Sacrifice, which is the central act of her liturgy; but she has proclaimed again and again that in her mind the altar represents her Lord Himself. He is Altar, Victim and Priest; and the reverence for the altar, expressed in the restraint and dignity of its design, symbolizes the reverence due to Christ Himself.”

If the spindly “community table” of your church doesn’t seem quite right, here’s why.