PEOPLE of GOD
4
june/july 2020
Jesus Christ Abides In Us Always
W
hen we were children, every Christmas morning my brother, sisters and I would come downstairs to the living room to open our presents under the tree. My father’s Kodak Super 8 camera was rolling, attached to two extremely bright floodlights. As we viewed these films in later years you could see the four of us blinking and squinting as we put our hands up in front of our faces to shield us from the intense light. Of course, the light was not bright enough to keep us from going directly to our presents! I was thinking of those
family films as I watched our wonderful parishioners coming back to the cathedral for the recently opened Masses. It was as if we were all blinking and squinting, shielding our faces with our masks and cautiously coming out from our “sheltering in place.” I think we all felt a bit awkward, but nothing was going to stop us from gathering around the Eucharistic table again. Another image that comes to mind is that of Lazarus coming out of the tomb. Perhaps we felt the way he did when he heard Jesus cry out, “Unbind him!” It was freeing and deeply satisfying to be back in church as we broke open the Word and broke Bread together. I believe that we have learned a lot in these past several months. We have certainly learned just how much we love the Eucharist, evidenced by how much we missed it. We are truly a Eucharistic people, formed and fashioned by the saving bread from heaven. So many have told me that to be without the Eucharist
these past two months has been incredibly difficult. Such pain is unfortunate, but it is a testimony to our love for Christ, the Bread of Life. Similarly, we have learned how much our fellow parishioners mean to us -- praying with them, sharing the sign of peace with them, processing with them and singing with them. The General Instruction of the Roman Missal reminds us that Christ is present par excellence in the Eucharistic Species as well as in the Word, the priest and the assembly. Connecting again with the assembly as well as with the priest is very much like a Christmas morning gift. There is yet another important lesson that we have learned, namely, that Christ’s presence in our lives is not limited to church but rather abides deeply within you and me, the living stones of the Body of Christ. It would be a mistake to allow Christ’s presence at the Eucharist to obscure the many ways that Jesus
is present to us in our day-to-day lives even, and particularly, when “sheltering in place.” I often come back to a line in John Pierre de Caussade’s book, Abandonment to Divine Providence, which reads, “Faith sees that Jesus Christ is present in everything and works through all history to the end of time; that every fraction of a second, every atom of matter contains a fragment of his hidden life and his secret activity.” As baptized Catholics, we believe that our relationship with Christ is dynamic, ever growing and central to our lives. Even though we missed coming to Eucharist, we had the benefit of realizing that Jesus was very much with us as we sheltered in place. As I often say during these uncertain times, “If you cannot get to church then the Church will get to you.” Yes, it was a sacrifice to be away from the Eucharist these many weeks but that did not mean that we were not close to the Lord. As Jesus promised us in Matthew’s Gospel this past Ascension, “I will be with you always until the end of the age.” (Matthew
