I remember the final time that my classmates and I gathered for Eucharist at seminary. These were people I had lived with, grown with and learned with for four years. I watched each of them go to and return from the table. I knew the ones who were difficult to get along with, the ones who were brilliant, the ones who were likely to make wonderful pastors and the ones who nearly flunked out. It is a meal in which we are united not only with Christ but with one another and sometimes I have to just sit and watch and take that in.
Communion is followed by a post communion hymn of some kind, the benediction and the dismissal.
It is a funny quirk of history that the service became known as the mass because of this closing phrase. It is almost as if people looked forward to the dismissal so much they named the whole service the dismissal. You will notice that the last rubric in the Eucharistic liturgy makes no provision for a closing hymn. Having a closing hymn was more a product of the reformation and the more ancient form of the mass never included any singing after communion. What we have tried to do here at Peace is that in penitential seasons we have no closing hymn and during festival times we have a rousing closing song.