https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=Jc95Pthy3qM
As a new Catholic, I’ve never veiled in chapel before, and I will today. Could you explain the symbolism of the practice to help me to internalize it for my experience today? Wow, the veil? You could ask me to talk about that? Oh man, talk about a minefield. No, I’m okay to talk about that. So the veil, there are two, I’m going to focus on one reason, there are two reasons, I’m going to focus on one which is easier to focus on. The veil has to do with this mystery. One of the problems that happens with the fall is we’re away from the garden, we’re kind of removed from the garden, and we look at the garden from far away. Now Christ has given us a way to receive from the holy place, and so the priest from the altar will bring down the divine presence into the church, just in a way that is making us participate in the incarnation itself. So from the holy place comes this mystery. But this is going to get tough because in the traditional church, in the ancient church, the holy place had veils too. Like in the orthodox church we still have veils. There’s a veil which is just like the veil in the temple, there’s a veil between the and the altar. And that veil is to help us understand the distance between us and the holiest thing. Now in the temple, the veil never opened, the veil was closed and only one person in the entire nation could go once a year into the holy of holies, and they had to tie a rope in his ankle because he could just die there, they would have to pull him out because it was so closed off and holy. Whereas in Christianity Christ has opened the veil, but we still need the veil. If we don’t have the veil, then we end up mistaking the mystery for something lower than what it really is. Now that’s what happens. If you don’t have some form of veil between the holiest place and you, even that veil must open and things must come, but if you don’t, then what you end up with in the end is you can get communion in the mail if you’re a certain kind of Protestant and they send you little packets with like a little bit of wine, a little bit of bread, you can get it through the mail and then you can just have it at home while you’re watching TV. So if you don’t have that veil you end up cheapening the mystery to a point where it doesn’t have any mystery anymore. And so the veil that St. Paul talks about, the veil that he asks women to wear, that has the same meaning because each woman is possibly an image of the Mother of God, is it possibly an image of the Virgin. And just like the Virgin is veiled, just like she is the Holy of Holies, each woman has the potential of being that for her husband. And so there’s this, that’s why, one of the reasons why the veil existed in the Christian tradition was to create that, to preserve the mystery of the holy place. That is one of the reasons. There’s another reason which is more complicated, but I won’t go into that one, but maybe that can help you a little bit.