Glory bee.

I had the rare pleasure recently of a private Mass; that is, a Mass at which there were only two people, not counting Christ, who arrived during the Eucharist. There was the priest, and there was me.

Outside the room there were two sparrows also, and inside the room, it turned out later, was a bee. I believe it was the common honey bee, apis mellifera, and not one of its cousins, api dorsata, floreata, cerana, or laboriosa, but I didn't get close enough for an especially good look, and neither did the priest.

The Mass was in a room in a residence hall at a college because the priest and I had not been able to find a Mass being said elsewhere during a day in which we had been thrown together in the social ramble. As each of us did not wish to go a Sunday without spiritual sustenance and the nutritious central ritual of our faith, I found a room in a residence hall, and the priest, as he said, found the materials necessary for him to say Mass.

The bee lifted off from a windowsill just as the priest finished preparing his cruets of water and wine and opened his book to begin Mass. It began to fly due north, toward the table where Mass was about to commence; it did not fly in a straight line but in a series of short zigzags, not unlike repetitive dance steps. It is interesting to note in this regard that apis mellifera, like all honey bees, conducts a dance to inform its mates of food sources. There are three dances: the round dance, the sickle dance (used only by the Italian race of mellifera), the waggle dance. The dances may indicate meals as far away as 1,000 meters.

The meal of the Mass began. Opening prayers, first reading, second reading, the bee is still aloft, gospel reading, bee subsides, creed, intercessions, bringing-forth of the gifts by yours truly, bee is up, Communion, bee is down, concluding blessing, bee is up, the Mass is ended, bee is down, go in peace, and the bee is cutting dance steps in the air.

The words in the air with the bee have been powerful and spare, as simple and sweet and dangerous as the bee, as potentially painful and penetrating -- like nails through palms. The priest has sung and chewed the words as if they were poems, which they are and I heard them as the first time, my mind circling and waggling, remembering the days many ago when I was a child standing in a with the Mass washing over me like a sea of sound. As a child I was picking up a fallen word here and there, and from these spent beautiful bees falling arround me, apis mellifera in the autumns of their days, the words falling on the pews on the floor and on the shoulders of the men and women around me, I built a story about the Mass, about sweet stinging Christ, about the God I heard and smelled, but could never see. I built a story about believing against all reason and rationality that God once showed his sad, radiant, brown-bearded Judean face and danced upon this earth and put Aramaic words into the dusty air.

Then I heard other stories and stitched them into my story too, and then after many years I am standing in a room after a private Mass and I am thinking that the Mass, stripped to its bones, is a fiercely persistent memoir, a naked meal for a naked carpenter, an act of exuberant joy that he lived and died and lived.

How apt that this Mass be said over a circling bee and two birds as well as one stung man; for the Mass brings all creatures together in and under the Word, which was in the beginning, which has no end, which will always bee.