By F. Luis Casasus, General Superior of idente missionaries
Commentary on the Solemnity of The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ- Solemnity, June 03, 2018, New York. (Book of Exodus 24:3-8; Letter to the Hebrews 9:11-15; Saint Mark 14:12-16.22-26.)
Sorry if I may seem hypersensitive or exaggerate, but it has always struck me how hard we try to carefully prepare children for their First Communion and we, however, consider something normal and routine action to receive the body and blood of Christ. This is what I think when I see people laughing and chatting with each other just before the Eucharist and many priests joking in the sacristy.
Probably, we are always in need of a renewed sensitivity to the presence and the action of God in our lives. Most of times we are not ready to take full advantage of the action of the Holy Spirit. The circumstances of life often limit our vision, keep us from seeing God, right here, all around us, walking beside us. We live in a world in which pain and fear, uncertainty and limitation are the rules of the game. This is why Jesus, after his Resurrection, always greeted his disciples with the words: Peace be with you, preparing them to be receptive to His words and deeds; this is why our mystical life starts and continues with a permanent growth of our awareness of the Holy Spirit’s signs and manifestations.
On a grey Friday in January 2007, during the peak of the early morning rush, a young man entered a train station in Washington D.C.
As the crowds rushed by, the man found a place to stand out of the way of the commuters rushing into the station. He opened the violin case he carried and then he proceeded to begin playing.
But this was no ordinary street musician. Joshua Bell is one of the top musicians in the world. He has since performed with almost all of the world’s major orchestras and conductors. Bell played his heart out on his four million dollar 1713 Stradivarius violin.
He played six difficult Bach pieces for about 45 minutes. During that time, since it was rush hour, thousands of people went through the station, most of them on their way to work. The one who paid the most attention was a 3-year-old boy. His mother tagged him along, hurried but the kid stopped to look at the violinist. Finally the mother pushed hard and the child continued to walk turning his head all the time. In the 45 minutes the musician played, only 6 people stopped and stayed for a while. About 20 gave him money but continued to walk their normal pace. He collected 32 US dollars.
This was part of a social experiment about perception, taste and priorities of people. Do we perceive beauty? Do we stop to appreciate it? Do we recognize the presence of God in an unexpected moment? If we do not have a moment to stop and listen to one of the best musicians in the world playing the best music ever written, how many other things are we missing?
For good or for bad, in our spiritual life we miss or do not fully understand a great deal of events. Just some examples:
* The disciples of Emmaus were trying to make sense of failure when Jesus joined them on their journey. Later, it took them a lot of time to recognize Him.
* When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?
* When did we see you hungry or thirsty, sick or in prison, and did not help you?
What about you and me? Let us face it, life typically is not “fantastic”. Usually, life is ordinary and sometimes painful. But that is when we do the most learning and growing. That is when we have the greatest opportunity to encounter the risen Jesus if we have eyes to see Him in the most complicated and disappointing of our neighbors. At the other extreme, in the Holy Communion we daily have the privilege of realizing unity between Him and ourselves. What is a stronger image of unity than eating bread, this bread that becomes part of our body? What is stronger than drinking wine, which becomes part of our blood? The Holy Eucharist, as the top sacrament of the Church, produces what it means, according to the classical meaning of a sacrament.
How do you receive Holy Communion? Do you go up mindlessly, along in the Communion line in a mechanistic way? Or do you go up powerfully aware of He, whom you are about to receive? Are you grateful and amazed at what he has done and what he offers?
Wine and bread mean life and food. As the symbols of life and food, Jesus choose the blood in form of wine and for food he chose bread, one of the most common foods (along with rice, corn and other cereals). Is there something more basic than life and food?
Our “daily bread” is part of the petition in the Our Father. Death was introduced to humanity through eating the forbidden fruit and now life is restored by actually eating the bread of life, that is Christ’s flesh.
Blood was forbidden in the Old Testament. It was reserved for one thing: atonement.
The blood flowing in our veins is the world’s most amazing medicine. Blood, and the medicines made from blood, are saving more lives than any one drug that science has ever discovered, and there is still much to learn in how to use blood in the fight against disease.
Blood has always fascinated man, and he has tried to deepen into its mysteries for centuries. In the year 1628, William Harvey, discovered that the blood was a “river of life” flowing around in the human body, and shortly many blood transfusions were made, and many lives were saved. Now, blood could be preserved or “canned” for emergency and future use, and we have today the “blood banks,” which are endeavoring to serve day and night and which have as their slogan: Blood is life. Help save a life. Yes; in many different ways, “blood is life,” These are the words of our Father Founder (1991):
When Christ reveals that the Eucharist is the bread of life (cf. Jn 6:35), He does not restrict this life only to that of the spirit, but to an integral life; that is, to a truly human life. If there is a truly medicinal sacrament, this is the Eucharist. This sacrament is given for the development of all genetic values proper to human life; its mission is corrective of our pathological condition.
The Eucharist does feed and heal (Lamb of God, you take away the sins of the world). What do we do when we feel unable to cope with the complexities and obscurities of our lives? What do we do when we need power from beyond ourselves to bring about a wholeness, a peace, which we cannot give ourselves? We generally do all kinds of things, and we often grow depressed, frustrated and despairing.
But we can touch the hem of Christ’s garment. Like the woman who had been suffering from internal bleeding for many years and nothing had worked for her.
To do so, today we have been given the Eucharist. In it, God holds us to his heart.
That woman felt a power flow into her.
The Eucharist is meant to function like that. In it, we touch the hem of Christ’s garment and are held to his heart. What happens there is something beyond words and understanding, though not beyond love. Like love, the Eucharist does not need to be understood or explained with physical or psychological arguments; it needs only to be touched. In the Eucharist, as in love, the main thing is that we be held.
In the Eucharist, God functions as a mother. An anxious and tired child held to its mother’s breast eventually becomes calm and returns to the floor with a peace and a strength that cannot be transmitted through words. Words have an extraordinary power. But in critical situations, they often are not enough. When this happens, we still have the physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot. Jesus, through His words, stirred hearts, healed people, and boosted conversions. On the night before his death, Jesus went beyond words. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, with which he holds us to his heart. Hugs, kisses, laughter, caresses, even winking the eye just work, their inner dynamics need no elaboration
There is in an embrace something beyond what can be explained biologically or psychologically. Power is transmitted through love that goes beyond rational understanding.
This how the Eucharist works. In it, God physically embraces us.
Many of us personally witnessed the attitude of our Father Founder after receiving Holy Communion, or when he spent hours or some spare time before the Eucharist: He would consistently approach us with some new suggestion, sharing with us a new apostolic project or a contagious dream from the Kingdom of God.
We use food to celebrate. It is how we offer hospitality. It is the sacrament of family and friendship. So in our minds, food is comforting. It is a pledge of loyalty and commitment: The Christmas dinner, a wedding cake, a birthday lunch…The early Christians devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers… And all who believed were together and had all things in common; and they sold their possessions and goods and distributed them to all, as any had need (Acts 2: 42, 44-45).
Service and forgiveness. We are called to join ourselves in this sacrifice of Christ: Do this in memory of me. To do this in memory of Him is also to live out that sacrifice in our daily life by offering ourselves in humble and selfless giving for God our fellowmen.
Just as Jesus gave his body and shed his blood for us, through the Eucharist we are invited and enabled to live for others. Nourished by the body and blood of Christ, we grow in awareness of the dignity and value of every person. Nourished by the body and blood of Christ, we became sensitive to human suffering and misery, to injustices and wrongdoings in society and seek ways to effectively remedy such situations.
Those of you who have seen The heart of a murderer, a film by Catherine McGilvray, will be doubly shocked by the following story:
The scene is a courtroom trial in South Africa. A frail old black woman rises slowly to her feet. Facing across the room are several white security police officers, one of whom, Mr van der Broek, has just been tried and found implicated in the murders of both the woman’s son and her husband some years before. He had come to the woman’s home, taken her son, shot him at point blank range and then set the young man’s body on fire while he and his officers partied nearby.
Several years later, van der Broek and his cohorts had returned to take away her husband as well. For many months she heard nothing of his whereabouts. Then almost two years after her husband’s disappearance, van de Broek came back to fetch the woman herself. How vividly she remembers that evening, going to a place beside a river where she was shown her husband, bound and beaten, but still strong in spirit, lying on a pile of wood. The last words heard from his lips as the officers poured gasoline over his body and set him aflame were: Father forgive them…
Now the woman stands in the courtroom and listens to the confessions offered by Mr van de Broek. The judge turns to her and asks: So what do you want? How should justice be done to this man who has so brutally destroyed your family? I want three things, begins the old woman calmly, but confidently. I want first to be taken to the place where my husband’s body was burned so that I can gather up the dust and give his remains a decent burial. She pauses, then continues: My husband and son were my only family, I want secondly, therefore, for Mr van der Broek to become my son. I would like him to come twice a month to the ghetto and spend a day with me so that I can pour out on him whatever love I still have remaining in me. And finally, she says, I want a third thing. This is also the wish of my husband. And so, I would kindly ask someone to come to my side and lead me across the courtroom so that I can take Mr van der Broek in my arms and embrace him and let him know that he is truly forgiven. As the court assistants come to lead the elderly woman across the room, Mr van der Broek, overwhelmed by what he has just heard, faints. Those in the courtroom, family, friends, neighbors –all victims of decades of oppression and injustice– begin to sing, softly but assuredly: Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me.
Nourished by the body and blood of Christ, we experience a deep desire to love and forgive our neighbor and every human being When you forgive, just as Peter was forgiven, you are most like Jesus.
