John Chapter Six

Saturday 3rd Week Easter Week 2010 - Fr. Mark The open of prayer of today’s Mass has the words, “May we … remain true to (the) gift of life.” And in today’s gospel reading … we see the reactions of some of those who would not accept Jesus’ reply is that, “it is the spirit who gives life, the flesh – human nature - has nothing to offer". "The words I have spoken,” he says, “are spirit and they are life.” In other words, his teaching about receiving his body and love in the Eucharist are true. Those who turned away from Jesus were not to know that it was his resurrected body and blood he was speaking about. We don’t know if our faith would have held firm if we had been in the crowd. So in humility but with thankfulness let us celebrate this mystery of Christ’s real and risen body and blood. Reflection – Caryll Houselander "I am the living bread" IT WOULD SEEM impossible, did we not know it to be true, that God could abide with us always, in littleness and humility even more extreme than infancy. Or that His love should choose to give us the unity of His birth and death and resurrection, always taking place at the heart of the world, from sunrise to sunset, and all life, and all love, always radiating from it. Yet this is so. Every day, every hour, Christ is born on the altar in the hands of the priest. Christ is lifted up and sacrificed; Christ is buried in the tomb of the human heart and Christ rises from the tomb to be the life of the world through His Communion with men. This is the Host-life. Everything that has been said in this book could be said again of the Host. Everything relates to the Host. If we live the Host-life in Christ, we shall bring to life the contemplation of the Passion of the Infant Christ and live it in our own lives. The Host is the Bread of Life. It is the good seed that the Sower sowed in His field; it is the Harvest ready for the reaping. It is the seed that is sown by the Spirit in every public way and every secret place on earth. It is the seed which, whenever it is buried, springs up from the grave, to Sower with Everlasting Life. It is the mystery of the Snowflake. The Inscape of Thabor and of the Passion of the Infant. It is the whiteness, the roundness, the littleness, which at once conceals and reveals the plan of Eternal Love. It is the littleness, the dependence, the trust in human creatures of the Divine Infancy. It is the silence of the Child in the womb: the constriction of the swaddling bands. It is the Bread which is broken and yet is our wholeness. The wholeness of all that is. It is the breaking of the Bread which is the Communion of all men in Christ, in which the multiple lives of the world are one Christ-life, the fragmentary sorrows of the world are one Christ-Passion: the broken loves of the world are one Christ-love. The Host seems to be divided among us; but in reality we, who were divided, are made one in the Host. It is the obedience of childhood. The simplicity which is the singleness of childhood's love. It is the newness in which Heaven and earth are made new. It is the birth of Christ in the nations; the restoring of the Christ-Child to the world; of childhood to the children. With the dawning of this turbulent twentieth century came the children's Pope, Pius X, to give Holy Communion to the little ones. In the hearts of the little children, Christ went out to meet Herod all over the world. The Mass is the Birth and Death and Resurrection of Christ: in it is the complete surrender of those who love God. The Miracle of Cana takes place. The water of humanity is mixed into the wine and is lost in it. The wine is changed into the Blood of Christ. In the offering of the bread and wine we give material things, as Our Lady gave her humanity, to be changed into Christ. At the words of Consecration the bread and wine are not there any more; they simply are not any more but, instead, Christ is there. In that which looks and tastes and feels like unleavened bread, Christ comes closer to us even than the infant could come, even than the child in the womb. He is our food, our life. We give ourselves up to Him. He gives Himself up to us. He is lifted up in the priest's hands, sacrificed. God accepts the sacrifice and gives Christ back to us. He is lowered onto the altar; He who was taken down from the Cross is given to us in Communion; buried, laid to rest in our hearts. It is His will to rise from the dead in our lives and to come back to the world in His risen Host-life. In His risen life on earth Christ often made Himself recog­nized only by the characteristic of His unmistakable love; by showing His wounds, by His infinite courtesy, by the breaking of Bread. He would not allow the sensible beauty and dearness of His human personality, His familiar appearance, to hide the essential Self that He had come back to give. Wholly consistent with this is Christ's return to us in the Host. We know that in It He is wholly present, Body, Blood, Soul, Divinity. But all this is hidden, even His human appearance is hidden. He insists, because this is the way of absolute love, on coming to us stripped of everything but Himself. For this Self-giving Christ in the Host is poor, poorer than He was when, stripped of everything, He was naked on the Cross. He has given up even the appearance of His body, the sound of His voice, His power of mobility. He has divested Himself of colour and weight and taste. He has made Himself as close to nothing as He could be, while still being accessible to us. In the Host He is the endless "Consurnmaturn est" of the Passion of the Infant Christ. In the Host He is our Life on earth today. There is no necessity for me to describe the average life. Too many know it. Countless millions have to make the way of the Cross and the way to Heaven through the same few streets, among the same tiny circle of people; through the same returning monotony; while many, many others have even less variety in their lives, less outward interest and less chance of active mercy or apostleship-e-those who are incurably ill or in prison, or very old, confined not only to one town or village, but to one room, to one bed in a ward, to one narrow cell. Everyone wants to take part in the healing and comforting of the world, but most people are dogged by the sense of their own futility. Even the power of genius and exceptional opportunity dwindles, measured against the suffering of our times. It is then hardly to be wondered at if the average person whose life is limited by narrow circumstances and personal limita­tions feels discouragement that is almost despair. Living the Christ-life means that we are given the power of Christ's love. We are not only trustees of God's love for man, entrusted to give it out second-hand, but miraculously, our love IS His love! "I have bestowed my love upon you, just as my father has bestowed his love upon me; live on, then, in my love." (John xv. 9.) The Host-life is an intense concentration of this power of love. The Host-life is not something new or different from the Christ-life that we know already. It is the very core of it, and it was given to us at the Last Supper when Christ gave Himself to us in the Blessed Sacrament. The Host-life is the life which Christ Himself is living in the world now. It is His choice of how to live His life among us today. At first sight it is baffling that it should be so. About the author: Caryll Houselander (1901-1954) became a Catholic at the age of six, hence the autobiographical "A Rocking Horse Catholic". Her writing was original and powerful. Mgr. R. Knox suggested that she open a school for spiritual writers. He said she seemed to find, ''not merely the right word but the telling word that left you gasping." Her own works, published by Sheed & Ward, became best sellers. They include ''The Comforting of Christ", "The Reed of God" and "Guilt". This booklet, "Christ Within Us", published by crs 1957, was adapted from the book, "The Passion of the Infant Christ"(1949).