From the Rector
“O Sacred Banquet this Sunday, wherein Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is renewed, the mind is filled with grace and a pledge of future glory is given to us. Alleluia!”
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Dear friends,
This Sunday, being the Feast of Corpus Christi, and known more long-windedly as the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, acclaims the immeasurable gift of Christ’s true presence in the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist. Christ said, “This is my Body,” and his promise suffices to those who share the Bread and Wine that they are his saving Body and Blood. With the earliest Christians, we believe there is more than what our eyes behold.
Each time we offer the Sacrament in remembrance of Jesus, “The angels surround the priest,” Saint John Chrysostom wrote, and he goes on to say, “The whole sanctuary and the space before the altar is filled with the heavenly Powers come to honor Christ who is present upon the altar.”
Heaven and earth gather in common chorus of praise with thanksgiving for this heavenly medicine that satisfies our hunger and quenches our thirst.
As we ready for this celebration, here’s an amazing passage from J.R.R. Tolkien on the Eucharist:
“Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. . . . There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death.
“By the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste—or foretaste—of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.
“The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion. Though always itself, perfect and complete and inviolate, the Blessed Sacrament does not operate completely and once for all in any of us. Like the act of Faith it must be continuous and grow by exercise.
“Frequency is of the highest effect.
“Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.
“Also I can recommend this as an exercise (alas! only too easy to find opportunity for): make your Communion in circumstances that affront your taste. Choose a snuffling or gabbling priest or a proud and vulgar friar; and a church full of the usual bourgeois crowd, ill-behaved children—from those who yell to those products of Catholic schools who the moment the tabernacle is opened sit back and yawn—open-necked and dirty youths, … Go to Communion with them (and pray for them).
“It will be just the same (or better than that) as a mass said beautifully by a visibly holy priest, and shared by a few devout and decorous people.
“It could not be worse than the mess of the feeding of the Five Thousand—after which our Lord propounded the feeding that was to come.”
(Can be found in The Philosophy of Tolkien: The Worldview Behind The Lord of the Rings, p. 219.)
May God bless and keep you as Jesus grows in you, so that it is he who lives and works and prays in you.
Yours in Christ~
Fr. Peter
