Developing a great love for the Eucharist

WE need time and effort to develop a great love for the Eucharist. More than that. We need to rev up our faith so we can truly take seriously these words of Christ that refer to the Eucharist: “Except you eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He who eats my flesh, and drinks my blood, has everlasting life and I will raise him up on the last day.” (Jn 6,53-54) 

 We need to rekindle our Eucharistic amazement and to intensify our Eucharistic piety, since in the Eucharist we really have Christ with us and he offers himself as food for our earthly journey toward eternal life. 

 Obviously for this devotion to keep going and growing, we need to grow in faith also, a faith that should be expressed always in deeds of hope and charity. 

 If we truly have faith and love in the Holy Eucharist, if we are truly Eucharistic souls, then we cannot help but be intensely and abidingly apostolic souls as well. 

 In fact, we need to be most zealous in our apostolate, since it actually is a duty incumbent on all Christian believers to have and to keep burning all throughout their lives, making use of all the situations and circumstances we may find ourselves in. 

 Everytime we hear Mass, receive Holy Communion or visit the Blessed Sacrament, we should remember those final and most heart-felt words of Christ to his apostles: “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation…” (Mk 16,15) 

 These words clearly indicate how Christ wants his work of redemption to continue. This time it will be carried out as a joint effort between him and us. While we are first of all the object of his redemptive work, we also become the subject of such work with him. 

 We also have to realize that we have in our hands a tremendous and delicate treasure that we need to take extreme care of. 

 Toward this end, we need to revive the proper understanding of the liturgy, and especially of the Holy Mass, and to reach that ideal of feeling that Eucharistic amazement that St. John Paul II talked about. 

 In an encyclical, the saintly Pope practically described the very essence of liturgy in these words: “In this gift Jesus entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery. With it he brought about a mysterious ‘oneness in time’ between that (Paschal) Triduum and the passage of the centuries.” (5) 

 In other words, in the liturgy, especially in the Holy Mass, we are made contemporaries with Christ in his supreme sacrifice of love for us on the cross and in his resurrection. Not only that, we are also made sharers of that supreme sacrifice! 

 If we just bother a little to consider this wonderful truth of our faith more thoughtfully, we could not help but be amazed at what we have in the Holy Eucharist! It is an amazement that is a result of a faith and love of God, and not of merely worldly marvels and instances of human exhilaration. 

 It is an amazement that first of all is spiritual and supernatural before it becomes human, emotional, psychological or physical. We need to fathom the spiritual and supernatural foundations of this marvel that is the Holy Eucharist in order to be truly amazed.

Christ gives himself to us completely

THAT’S what we can gather from what Christ said about himself being the Bread of Life. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eats of this bread, he shall live for ever; and the bread that I will give, is my flesh, for the life of the world.” (Jn 6,51) 

 This gives us a great reason to be truly happy and confident in our life which will always be marked with all sorts of challenges, trials, difficulties, etc. Christ wants to give himself completely to us so he and us can be one as we should, since we are God’s image and likeness, despite our weaknesses, limitations and sins. 

 We need to process this truth of our faith thoroughly and try our best to receive Christ as the Bread of Life in Holy Communion as worthily and frequently as possible. We need to enliven our belief that in Christ we have everything, we have what is truly and ultimately needed by us. Many of our needs are passing, are of a temporal nature. It is Christ who we truly and ultimately need. 

 And he gives himself so completely to us as to make himself bread to be eaten by us. Although he is like air since we cannot truly live without him, he compares and makes himself bread, because unlike air, he as bread has to be deliberately sought. 

 This duty of seeking him is what we have to be more aware of. In the Gospel itself, we hear our Lord saying, “Seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things shall be yours as well.” (Mt 6,33) Not only that, we should also spread this most wonderful truth as widely as possible. 

 In the first reading of the Mass on Thursday of the Third Week of Easter (cfr. Acts 8,26-40), we are told about the Apostle Philip who preached about Christ to an Ethiopian eunuch, giving us an example of how eager we should be to make Christ known, loved and received by as many people as possible. 

 Christ as the Bread of Life means that he is truly and really with us even while he sits at the right hand of the Father in heaven. We are not left only with some picture or souvenir or symbol of his. And he accompanies us in our earthly sojourn, giving us the ultimate means we need to tackle whatever we may encounter in this life. 

 It’s a madness of love to which we have to correspond as best that we can. God himself gives us the grace in abundance to enable us to correspond to that love. We should not be scared of the tremendous prospect before us. But it’s up to us if we choose to love him or not. We should do everything to make use of what God is making available to us. 

 We are told that if we are generous with God, God will even be more generous with us, for he cannot be outdone in generosity. He assures us that whatever little we give to him will always yield us a hundredfold. It’s always good to keep this divine assurance in mind. 

 We have to learn to subordinate our earthly and temporal concerns and plans to the task of seeking Christ. We have to be wary of being influenced mainly if not solely by the standards of practicality, convenience and other worldly values. That’s our problem. God is often left behind in the play of our competing interests.

Despite contradictions, just do a lot of good

THAT’S what we can gather from the readings of the Mass on Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter. (Acts 8,1-8; Jn 6,35-40) Whatever negative things we can encounter along the way, the good, which is a matter of believing in Christ, if not, identifying ourselves with him, will always prevail, if not soon, then in the end. 

 It’s amazing to note that, as narrated in the first reading, the still-unconverted Paul was one of the fiercest persecutors of the early Christians. And yet, later on, he became a most intense apostle. 

 Miracles indeed can happen. Extraordinary change of heart can take place. We have to be careful not to make some rash judgments, or if that cannot be avoided as a spontaneous reaction, we should also be quick to rectify ourselves. We should just focus on doing a lot of good even if we are misunderstood or misjudged. 

 Yes, we just have to learn how, with Christ, we can overcome and drown evil with an abundance of good. This is a very intriguing part of our Christian faith. Not only should we love our enemies, as Christ taught us, but we also need to drown evil with an abundance of good. This was specifically articulated by St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans where he said: 

 “Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everyone. If it is possible, as far as it depends on you, live at peace with everyone. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: ‘It is mine to avenge; I will repay,’ says the Lord. On the contrary: “If your enemy is hungry, feed him; if he is thirsty, give him something to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head.” (Rom 12,17-20) 

 We have to try our best to erase whatever disbelief, doubt or skepticism we can have as we consider this teaching, since most likely, our first and spontaneous reaction to it would precisely be those conditions. We can ask, even if done only interiorly, “Is Christ really serious about this? Can this thing that Christ and St. Paul are telling us, possible, let alone, doable?” 

 When these reactions come to us, it is time to remind ourselves that we just have to follow our faith that definitely contains a lot of mysteries and things supernatural that we are not expected to understand fully. Like Our Lady and all the saints, we should just believe and do what we are told because it is Christ who said so, and because it is the Church that teaches us so. 

 That’s what faith is all about. By believing first, then we can start to understand things that are hard to explain or articulate in human terms. As they say, that’s how the ball bounces. We should not waste time trying to understand everything at once or at the beginning. Let’s be game enough to go through some kind of adventure that, no matter how the outcome would be, we know that God is in control of everything. 

 In the meantime, guided by our faith, let’s begin to develop the appropriate attitudes, practices, habits and virtues. We have to learn the intricacies of charity, like being patient, magnanimous, compassionate and understanding, merciful, always friendly with everyone even if not everyone is friendly with us. We should be willing to suffer for the others and to bear their burdens.