Today
we celebrate the solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. It
makes sense, doesn’t it, that we devote a Sunday Eucharistic celebration to the
importance of the Eucharist itself. We
receive the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist each time we gather for
mass. We become what we receive,
which is why we as Christ’s disciples are called to be the Body of Christ here
on earth. It
sounds simple, but we know that it isn’t simple at all, that it has many
implications and ramifications in our lives.
The
Eucharist is to be the source and summit of our life as Catholics – that is a
phrase that came out of Lumen Gentium – the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church
from the Second Vatican Council. Our
children just finished Vacation Bible School with the theme: Everest – Conquering Challenges with God’s
Mighty Power. Think
of what a summit like Mount Everest is like. Mount
Everest is over 29,000 feet high. The
cross of iron, the high point of the Camino that I walked in Spain is 4,900
feet in altitude in comparison. And that
was a very strenuous mountain to climb, as well as the highest peak on the entire
Camino that stretches across northern Spain for 500 miles. I
read an article about 16 guides who were killed in April 2014 due to an
avalanche on Mount Everest, and another 19 who were killed in April of this
year when an avalanche was triggered by an earthquake that hit that country. Going
up a summit like Mount Everest or Pike’s Peak or Mount Kilimanjaro is serious
stuff – it is not something one does casually or passively or without thought. It is
something one has to train for rigorously for years beforehand. You
can be sure that the Church did not accidentally choose the metaphor of a
summit to convey the significance of the Eucharist. The
Eucharist is described as the summit, the apex, the pinnacle of our Christian
life by the Second Vatican Council because the Eucharist contains the whole
spiritual good of the Church – it contains Christ himself. Just
as a mountain climber has to actively climb a mountain summit, so we also have
to be active and intentional in the way we approach the Eucharist. We have to be properly prepared to fully
receive the grace that we encounter in Christ in the Eucharist. The
mass is there for us for a reason – it is there to give us spiritual
nourishment. It is
there to nourish those of us who have made the decision to follow Christ in our
lives, to strengthen us through whatever ups and downs we encounter on our
journey of faith.
The
Passover meal that Jesus celebrated with his disciples in the Last Supper as
described in the Gospel of Mark is an important Jewish festival that he
transformed into the Eucharist that we celebrate around the Lord’s table each
Sunday. When
I think about the Eucharist in my own life, this is the one encounter that
comes to my mind, that illustrates how important I want the Eucharist to be in
my life. I had
been a missionary in Ecuador for almost a year, and I was suffering very badly
from pneumonia and from a tropical fever.
My bones ached, my head was pounding, I alternated between burning up and
shivering. It
was a few minutes before the mass was supposed to start at 7:00 pm in the
evening. I could hear the church bells ringing, calling everyone to mass. However, I had so little energy and felt so
poorly that I could barely move a muscle.
I so needed the strength that I always got from the Eucharist. I so desired to go down to the church to
mass. But I knew I was in no condition
to do so. And I remember I started to cry – I felt so bad that my hunger for the Eucharist would have to go unfulfilled
that evening. I think about that incident, because I want to
have that burning desire to love the Eucharist, to see it as an important part
of my life, every day of my life. I
think about how I felt that evening, reflecting on how the majority of baptized
Catholics don’t attend mass on a regular basis. It
makes me wonder if some of us take the Eucharist for granted and thus casually
dismiss the nourishment we are offered in it, if some of us are lacking in the
disposition needed to out a life of discipleship, to be willing to receive the
grace that God offers us in our lives. This
has great implications on our call to Evangelization, doesn’t it? What
does this mean for the eternal destiny of the individual, of the mission of our
Church, of the life of our world?
St
Augustine said this about the Eucharist:
“This is our daily Bread; take it daily, that it may profit thee daily. Live,
as to deserve to receive it daily.” Yes,
the way we live our lives, the message that we bring to the world in our
actions and our words – this communicates to others what the Body and Blood of
Christ means to us. What is keeping us from reaching out to
others? What is keeping us from inviting
someone to reach out to a member of St James whom we’ve not seen recently, to
someone who has drifted away from our parish or from the Catholic faith? How
are we fulfilling the role of an evangelizer of the Good News of Jesus Christ,
of the presence of the Body and Blood of Christ in the world?
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