February 02, 2005
Eucharistic Reflection no. 16
St. John Chrysostom writes, “How many of you say: I should like to see His face, His garments, His shoes. You do see Him, you touch Him, you eat Him. He gives Himself to you, not only that you may see Him, but also to be your food and nourishment." How true is this even today? So many hours spent on our knees asking Jesus to reveal himself to us, to appear before our eyes so that we may see and touch him; like St. Thomas, “I will believe only when I put my finger in the hole in his side.” But as St. John Chrysostom reminds us we do see Him, even more we receive Him as our food in the Eucharist. True, it is a glance of faith, but that glance pierces deeper than any with our human eyes. How we would grow in our knowledge of the Lord if we ceased in constantly searching for miraculous apparitions and extraordinary revelations and spent that time getting to know Him truly present in the Eucharist.
Posted by Fr. Bryce Sibley at 08:33 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
January 18, 2005
Eucharistic Reflection no. 14
From the cloister, St. Teresa of the Andes writes to her grieving mother, "How I would have loved, mother dear, to be by your side to console and weep with you. But our souls met by the tabernacle" (LT 113). More than simply being a pious thought to comfort her mother, the little Carmelite saint from Chile offers a deep insight into the mystery of the Eucharist. True, it is Jesus Christ whom we encounter in the Most Holy Eucharist, but when we commune with the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, we also have a communion with the entire Body of Christ, the Holy Church. For indeed it is through the Eucharist that the entire Mystical Body of Christ is held together. So St. Teresa is correct, she is “mystically” at her mother’s side when she is worshipping before the tabernacle because through our incorporation into the Body of Christ at baptism the entire Body of Christ is somehow present there. Of course it is not the same type of presence as Christ, but it is a presence nonetheless, or else we cannot say the Church has a real communion with Christ, her Head and her Groom.
Posted by Fr. Bryce Sibley at 08:38 PM | Comments (2) | TrackBack