Real Presence

Modern medicine often gives us a new lease on life.  Friends have experienced this recently:  a quadruple heart bypass surgery that has promised  many more years of living; chemotherapy that has wiped out threatening tumors.    Fear has yielded to relief and the gift of new life has overcome pain and suffering.   For these individuals, life is forever changed.   They are renewed in energy and determination.  The bar of living has been raised leaving them eager to give back the new life they have been given.

Each Eucharistic liturgy offers us the opportunity for new life.   By partaking in the Eucharist, we share in the very life of God, who continually offers us new life.  This is summed up in our opening prayer for this Sunday’s celebration of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ:

O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament

have left us a memorial of your Passion,

grant us, we pray,

so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood

that we may always experience in ourselves

the fruits of your redemption.

This prayer was written by Thomas Aquinas for the feast of Corpus Christi.  Aquinas also wrote that “The proper effect of the Eucharist is the transformation of man into God.”   This is expressed in our Eucharistic prayers.  We invoke the Holy Spirit not only to change the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ:

Make holy, therefore, these gifs, we pray, by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall

But also, and more importantly, to transform ourselves:

Humbly we pray that, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ, we may be gathered into one by the Holy Spirit.

What does it mean to share in the divine life of God?  It means that each time we participate in the Eucharist, the bar is raised.   Gifted with the new life of God, we are challenged to continue the work of Jesus.   Picking up where Jesus left off could be as easy as picking up our hymnals and participating fully at the Eucharistic liturgy or as difficult as picking up the pieces when our lives become shattered.    Sharing in the divine life, we become the real presence of God.  If we were really present to God’s real presence, not only in the Eucharist, but in ourselves, there would be no need to continue to defend the “real presence” of Jesus in the Eucharist.  Our actions would say it all.  For,  Eucharistic people are the Gospel in action.   Amen!