My Dear Friends, Greetings, Are you hungry? Well today we celebrate a great feast of the Church and a great mystery that is at the heart of our identity as Catholic Christians. The mystery that we are the body of Christ because we are fed by Jesus’ own body and blood in the Eucharist. This is the feast (solemnity) of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). I like to tell the story of a man who was beginning his journey through the RCIA process to become Catholic and was looking through our parish calendar. As he was flipping through the months he was heard to say “Catholics sure must like to eat. They have so many feast days”. I got a chuckle out of that story but we need to remember as with Ascension Sunday, today we are again celebrating one of the great solemnities of the Lord. This is one of those days that we celebrate to the fullest extent possible. Today we reflect on our human hunger for food and drink but, more importantly on our spiritual hunger. We know that God came to us in human form in his Son Jesus. We also know that in that human form, he knew not only the everyday human needs of hunger and thirst, and how those needs can affect us, but he also recognized then and now that we can have a similar hunger in our relationship with God. If missing food and drink prevents us from living our best, how much more profound are the effects on our spiritual hunger of missing God? For some of us going to Mass can easily become routine, and that is very sad. The feast of Corpus Christi invites us to stop for a while and spend some time reflecting more deeply on this great mystery we call Eucharist, and to renew our living faith in the Eucharist. When we are invited to Mass we are invited to share Christ’s life of love with the Father. Additionally we are invited to recognize as St. Paul reminds us in the second reading, that in sharing in the body and blood of Christ, we are one with all God’s people, one body. By receiving Christ’s body and blood, in the Eucharist, we receive a food that transforms us into what it is itself-Christ’s own life, a life lived in joy and love of the Father. The 2nd Vatican Council called the sacrament of the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life” a paschal banquet “in which Christ is consumed, the mind is filled with grace and a pledge of future glory is given to us”. What this means is that when we eat the bread and drink from the chalice, that although we taste the bread and wine, we experience in faith the body and blood of Christ. St. Ignatius described the Eucharistic meal as “bread of angels, bread from heaven, medicine of immortality.” In conclusion let me give you some things to think about. As Christ shared his life with us, and continues to do so in the Eucharist, how do we, as the Body of Christ, share that gift with those who hunger for him, perhaps without even knowing it? Maybe there will be opportunities for each of us in the days, weeks, months and years ahead where we can be bread for others, broken and shared. In the Body and Blood of Christ, Faithful
Posted on: Thu, 19 Jun 2014 23:34:26 +0000
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