What you see here on the Lord’s table, my dear brethren, is bread and wine.  But once the word is pronounced over them, this bread and this wine become the body and the blood of the divine word.  He is the very Lord who “in the beginning was the word, and the word was with God, and the word was God.” (John 1:1)  Owing to his mercy, the Lord did not disdain the nature created by him in his own image, but, as you know, “the word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”  (John 1:14)  The same word assumed human nature; in other words, he took a human soul and body, became man, yet ever remained God.  And since the word suffered on our behalf, he left us his body and blood in this sacrament, in which he also included us.  For we, too, have been incorporated into his body, and through his mercy we are the very thing that we receive.

Bear in mind what this creature, wheat, was formerly when it still grew in the field; how the Earth caused it to germinate, how the rains nurtured it, how it ripened in kernels; and how afterward the laborers carried it to the threshing floor, treaded it, winnowed it, stored it in the granary, brought it out again to be milled, then added water to it and baked it, until at last it emerged as bread….  

Now ponder on what you have received.  And as it dawns on you what unity there is in the sacrament which has been instituted, be impressed with the unity that ought to prevail among yourselves, causing you to love one another, to remain steadfast in one faith, in one hope, and in mutual charity….  So, too, the wine made from many grapes is now one liquid, one sweet liquid in the chalice after being crushed in the wine press.  In Christ’s name you also, as it were, have come to be present in the chalice of the Lord, through your fasts and good works, through your humility and contrition.  There you are on the altar, there you are in the chalice.  In this sacrament you are united with us — we are joined together, we drink together, because we share life together.…

As soon as the word is spoken, the elements become the body and blood of Christ. For take away the word, and there is simply bread and wine.  But add the word, and it is altogether something else.  What else is it?  The body of Christ and the blood of Christ.  Take away the word, and it is only bread and wine.  Add the word, and it becomes a sacrament.  Thereupon you say Amen.  To say Amen is to subscribe to what has taken place.  Amen in Latin signifies, “So be it.”

RESPONSORY

   rightly do they love you. 

From the Dialogues of St. Catherine of Siena (+1380)

Oh, how sweet and pleasant to that soul and to Me is holy prayer, made in the house of knowledge of self and of Me, opening the eye of the intellect to the light of faith, and the affections to the abundance of My charity, which was made visible to you, through My visible only-begotten Son, who showed it to you with His blood! Which Blood inebriates the soul and clothes her with the fire of divine charity, giving her the food of the Sacrament [which is placed in the tavern of the mystical body of the Holy Church] that is to say, the food of the Body and Blood of My Son, wholly God and wholly man, administered to you by the hand of My vicar, who holds the key of the Blood. This is that tavern, which I mentioned to you, standing on the Bridge, to provide food and comfort for the travelers and the pilgrims, who pass by the way of the doctrine of My Truth, lest they should faint through weakness. This food strengthens little or much, according to the desire of the recipient, whether he receives sacramentally or virtually. He receives sacramentally when he actually communicates with the Blessed Sacrament. He receives virtually when he communicates, both by desire of communion, and by contemplation of the Blood of Christ crucified, communicating, as it were, sacramentally, with the affection of love, which is to be tasted in the Blood which, as the soul sees, was shed through love. On seeing this the soul becomes inebriated, and blazes with holy desire and satisfies herself, becoming full of love for Me and for her neighbor. 

RESPONSORY

Day 8

 

 

Day 10

Everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price. Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food. Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David. See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples. See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the Lord your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.

Seek the Lord while he may be found, call upon him while he is near; let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the Lord, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon. (Isaiah 55:1-7)

From The Eucharist — The Mystery of Our Christ by Karl Rahner (+1984)

It would be pitiful if we were to reconcile ourselves forever to the inadequate and perhaps half-magical misconceptions of this sacrament which we drag along with us from early religious instruction and from the practices of our childhood.  We should learn to understand what we do when we participate in the celebration of the mass, when we accept the sacrament.  This act should be more than the act performed out of a vague need to insure ourselves against God and to fulfill some legalistically interpreted demands of religion only by a dimly understood religious practice.  Here is the mystery of the absolute nearness of God, the mystery of his Christ, the sacrament of his death, the sacrifice of his church, the power of life, the bond of unity and love, the forgiveness of daily sinfulness, the promise of eternal life, the precelebration of eternity, and new and eternal covenant between God and his creation, the event of the tender meeting of the heart with the God of hearts, the acceptance of death and of life.  All this reality, to be sure, always encompasses our life and, perhaps, penetrates to the very middle of its most everyday misery as our eternity in our being, in our heart: in an hour of unconditional fidelity, in the darkness of death, in the blissfulness of love (who is able to say when God victoriously surmounts the walls of our disbelief?).  But precisely this mystery of our being appears in this sacrament as that which it is, whereas we overlook or misinterpret it in other forms.

And that is why the Christian cannot say that the communion of life with God does not need the communion with God under the sacramental sign, about which exactly the same must be said as pertains to the mystery of our life.  It will take us a long time before we really and genuinely will have understood what is so easily said concerning this sacrament.  We should entreat God for the grace to understand what we celebrate in faith, illuminated in spirit and heart to accept what we receive with the mouth.  And God who offered us the gift will also give us the understanding of the gift without which the gift itself will not bear fruit.

If we find it difficult to find the right approach to the inner understanding of this sacrament, we have to search our own souls.  Let us pose to ourselves the mystery of our own life from which we flee in the hustle and bustle of our everyday life and through the narcotics of our pleasures!  Let the infinite longing take power in us!  Hearken to the indwelling death in us!  Let us be horrified over the cruel loneliness of the human being locked up in us!  Let us seriously ask if the insensibility to God which we have tried to assess as an accusation against him, or as half-admitted proof against his existence, is not really that with which we have allied ourselves deep down in our hearts, so that we do not have to become men of infinite love, men of eternity who blissfully let God make exorbitant demands on them.  If in this or similar ways (there are innumerable more) we undeviatingly resist our own true selves, we will suddenly receive an understanding of this sacrament.  For what we hear from him in faith will suddenly sound as the answer to the question which came up in us, which is our selves.  Do we suffer from the distance from God?  Here is the voice of him who spoke in the utter darkness of death: Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit.  Here he is with his death!  Do we suffer from the pain of being unable to love?  Here is the one who in the night when he was betrayed (he was betrayed by us all) loved his disciples up to the end.  Would we like to be loyal to the Earth and no longer see the works of this Earth perish?  Here is the transfigured world in the transfigured flesh of the resurrected, here is the beginning of the glorious validity of this Earth!  Take and eat the pledge of the salvation and glorification of all flesh!  Are we tormented by the ambiguity, the fragility and hollowness of our own being, its guilt, its failure, its horrendous wretchedness?  Here is the one who has suffered for us, as he was without guilt, through all the abysses of our guilt, since he became a curse for us, who, knowing us to our abysses, accepted us, loved us, healed us!  Are we tormented by the fear of meaningless decay and destruction?  Here is the one who has anticipated all meaningless decay and destruction, who has redeemed them and who gives us power in pure powerlessness to accept them.  Here is everything: the meaning, the pain, and the bliss of our existence.  Hidden, however, and open only to faith.  But truly and really.  O holy banquet, thus will we pray with the church, in which Christ is received, in which his suffering in commemorating celebration is made present, and in which is give the pledge of our approaching glory.

RESPONSORY