Saturday, June 5, 2010

"Beg the Holy Spirit to help you to understand the Eucharist"

I was very moved by this story at Da Mihi Animas.

Jesus' admonition that "you cannot serve two masters" has a way, as with all His admonitions, of dawning on one anew as though one had never heard it before. This dawning can come through the results of sin and also so often comes with Eucharistic awareness, that is, a new awareness of His true presence.

No longer do the words in such case sound like a teaching moment, easily understood yet still abstract, but become a solid interjection in the momentum of your life - albeit an unforced interjection. The presence of Jesus among us under the species of bread and wine is one that must finally become for us our sole inestimable treasure, and not just one presence among many.

The miraculous banquet of the Unfathomable Other must be woven into the regular stream of our life; but then that diffusion, the incarnation of Jesus and His most intimate working in our souls, must be remembered as, and brought back to, the miraculous banquet of the Unfathomable Other again (that our selves not become our ends) - the banquet that can restore a burned infant with new skin and cause a thousand people to give pure praise in the midst of a garbage dump (see story above).

How often devotion gets in the way! (Or, ahem, liturgical talk) For it seems to me that people like to say of others who go steadily to Adoration and daily Mass that they are very devoted, devout; and they say this as a means of dulling the efficaciousness of that person's practises from infesting the regularity (or secularity) of their own lives. (If you're "devout", then I'm safe - from you.)

The great burning question that still faces us who don't live in garbage dumps remains this one: where does your treasure lie? For there also is your heart. When Jesus said that between the two masters you will end up loving one and hating the other, there was also the obvious implication that you will end up cleaving to one and severing ties with the other - a natural outcome.

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