Jesus saw the hungry crowds, hungry for his words, for healing, and for real food, and he was moved with compassion to feed them. The original Greek word used to describe the compassion of Jesus when the New Testament was first written, expresses compassion as the feeling in the entrails of the body, or, as we would say today, to feel it in our guts. Figuratively speaking, that is the place where our most intimate and intense emotions are located; the center from which both passionate love and passionate hate develop – all those gut feelings.
Compassion is the haunting call from Jesus to turn us back to him, to witness with our lives what we claim of him with our mouths -- to confront injustice on his behalf. What he feeds us can lead us to change our way of living. Transformation is what the Lord provides for us in every Eucharist. Through his gift we become greater than we were prior to receiving him. It reminds us that miracles are possible even when darkness seems overwhelming. It is a miracle that reminds us that God’s love is ever-present and open to us to help and heal us and to unite us.
Such transformation is happening with Catholics all over the world every day, in every language and country. Communion takes place where a church has been burned to the ground, or bombed out like in parts of Africa, Asia, South and Central America, and Eastern Europe. Whether in a hut, or the trenches of Afghanistan and Iraq, or in a cathedral or someone’s home; hope in who we can become replaces despair, and we are made whole by the Memorial and remembrance –we are brought to life again—the Spirit bringing life out of death, light into darkness.
It is like a global embrace of grace that flows daily from altars throughout the world—outward to help all know we are with him—but we need to cooperate with that grace. It is the constant journey into hope for better life; a mystical time that has no time, every since he said.
“take this and eat, this is my body, take this and drink, this is my blood.”
Entering into the Lord’s Supper is an agreement for us to grow and change to be more like him. It isn’t always easy to be more like Jesus to go through the challenges in life and remember the meal we share with him and one another. But it is in the trying over and over again that we become more open to his grace offered to us. We also learn by our return to him that the indispensable requirement to celebrate the Eucharist meal is a community. And not just any group but a faith community that believes it will be transformed—once more cleansed, forgiven, made whole together to go out once more and live what we have eaten in a meal shared.
How empty would our lives be without coming together to be reconciled in his meal? For it gathers the gifts we have received so that we will care and share, as a faith community that welcomes the stranger, feeds and cares for those who are poor, those who are sick, those who feel alienated, and those who are often called “foreigner”. In Communion, we are challenged to see better all of our neighbors as a part of the human family that Jesus came to unite. That communion may at times exclude some who cannot receive due to marital issues or other factors in life, yet at Mass and prayer we are all spiritually in Communion with the Lord and one another.
We understand that there is more to life than just "me"--my needs, and my way of living, as we enter the presence of God. And I know many of you experience and feel his presence. I cannot tell you the number of times I fight back the tears, overcome with such great emotion when I feel that presence in my life. Such times as during the consecration at the altar when I am overcome by the sense of his transforming presence—and I am humbled, but I know I cannot stay with him in private, he calls me out to others, just as he does to all of us. And whenever I give out Communion I see his transforming presence take hold; in the eyes of those who receive him. People filled with an overwhelming sense of his presence in their lives.
I know that our Eucharistic Ministers at Mass, those who serve to carry the Lord to convalescent homes and hospitals or to our homebound also experience that same connectedness. Eyes of joy, of sadness, of suffering encountered, but all filled with hope, the hope of faith that we bring together to him, Jesus with us, in us, and waiting for us to become like him—with one another.
Is there any question as to why then we have made the central act of Catholic worship the meal Jesus shared with that first community that long ago night? As the saying goes, we are what we eat!
Blessings, Fr Gordon
