Most of us meet the altar as furniture. It stands in the middle, or it stands at the far end, and we know without thinking that this is where the priest goes. Then someone calls it only a table, and someone else calls it only a shrine, and the Church’s actual teaching sits between those two reductions, unheard.
An altar is a table. The Last Supper will not let us forget that. It is also a stone of sacrifice. Calvary will not let us forget that. The Catholic instinct has always been to refuse the choice.
This little book is not a campaign about which way a priest should face, and it is not a catalogue of marble. It walks through what the Church actually does to a piece of stone before anyone is allowed to say Mass on it: the small square tomb cut in the surface, the relics that go into it, the five crosses a bishop anoints with chrism, the cloths that dress the slab as if it were a body, the stripping on Holy Thursday, the portable stone a chaplain once carried like a thick book.
Read it if you have genuflected toward that stone for forty years and could not say why it is stone. Read it if you have only ever heard it called a table and suspected there was more. The more is not decoration. The more is a grave, an anointing, and a meal that does not cancel the grave.
A Silent Homilies booklet. Written to be read in one or two sittings.