Holy Thursday (Fr. Francis)

If you are observant, you noticed when you came into church tonight that the tabernacle is empty. Why? For two reasons, really: First, to ensure that everyone receiving Holy Communion this evening does so from altar breads consecrated at this liturgical service, placing us at the Last Supper with Jesus and His chosen band. Second, and in some sense, even more importantly, to make us reflect on what life in the Church would be like without the Eucharistic Christ. How barren, how cold, how lifeless would our churches be if the Lord of the Eucharist were permanently absent, rather than truly present.

Perhaps this insight explains the centrality of the tabernacle in our churches. Perhaps this realization helps us understand what makes us genuflect when we enter a Catholic church, not in mockery like the soldiers during Our Lord’s Passion but in adoration and thanksgiving and love. For Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, comes into our midst in a unique and marvelous manner as the Church gathers to renew the Sacrament and Sacrifice which He bequeathed to her on this holy night. Imagine, the God in whom and through whom the universe was created comes among us and within us. My dear people, too many of us have become too accustomed to this simple fact of Catholic life; we need to be shaken out of our routine, in order to appreciate — as if for the first time — the true significance of it all.

The American convert to the Catholic Faith, Thomas Merton, at once an accomplished author and Trappist monk, describes in his autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, his First Holy Communion. As I share his reflections, think back on your own first encounter with the Jesus who desires and deigns to come to us under the forms of bread and wine. Merton puts it thus:

I saw the raised Host — the silence and simplicity with which Christ once again triumphed, raised up, drawing all things to Himself — drawing me to Himself. . . . I was the only one at the altar rail. Heaven was entirely mine — that Heaven in which sharing makes no division or diminution. But this solitariness was a kind of reminder of the singleness with which this Christ, hidden in the small Host, was giving Himself for me, and to me, and, with Himself, the entire Godhead and Trinity — a great new increase of the power and grasp of their indwelling that had begun [in me] only a few minutes before at the [baptismal] font . . . . In the Temple of God that I had just become, the One Eternal and Pure Sacrifice was offered up to the God dwelling in me: The sacrifice of God to God, and me sacrificed together with God, incorporated in His incarnation. Christ born in me, a new Bethlehem, and sacrificed in me, His new Calvary, and risen in me: Offering me to the Father, in Himself, asking the Father, my Father and His, to receive me into His infinite and special love. . . .

What magnificent thoughts. Most of us could not fashion the words in so poetic and powerful a way, but hopefully most of us had a similar experience at our First Holy Communion. I still recall with devotion and emotion that momentous occasion in my life in 1979, kneeling at the altar rail of St. Mary’s Church in my Parish in India. I can yet remember even the exact spot where I knelt at that rail and how the months of study and preparation seemed as nothing in the awareness that the God who had created both me and the universe was now coming to dwell within me in a new and wondrous manner. Having been baptized into Christ’s Body, the Church, which is likewise His Bride, I was now being brought into a union even more close and more intimate than that of marriage: Through the Eucharist, Jesus and I would become one.

How I trembled at the prospect for which I had waited so long, not from fear (because I was never trained to relate to God in that way) but from love and joy. The priest was only two children away from me, now one. Finally, he stood before me and signing me with the Sacred Host, prayed, “Corpus Domini nostri Jesu Christi custodiat animam tuam in vitam æternam.” (May the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ preserve your soul unto life eternal). As I opened my mouth and pillowed Christ on my tongue, I knew I was entering upon a new mode of existence, destined for life eternal.

We all need to recapture that enthusiasm, that innocence, that faith which brings us to appreciate precisely what the mystery of the Eucharist is and for us — what St. John Paul II referred to as “Eucharistic amazement.” If we did understand what we do so regularly, how different we would be — no sloppy or thoughtless genuflections; no half-hearted liturgical participation; no unworthy and unprepared for Communions; no arriving late and leaving early; no frivolous socializing in the presence of the One whom the Sacred Heart Litany calls “the King and center of all hearts.” Yes, my dear friends, we all need to ask Our Lord on this holy night to grant us the grace to have a second honeymoon with Him who, on the day of our First Holy Communion, became the Bridegroom of our souls.

Fr. A. Francis HGN