Fr. Simon's Letter - June 4, 2023

Next Sunday is the feast of Corpus Christi, the last Sunday in the long festal period of the liturgical year. It began with Ash Wednesday, reached a pinnacle at Easter, and continued to Pentecost. This feast of Corpus Christi offers us a moment to look back on it all and give thanks.

Gratitude is an abiding thing. You aren’t grateful if you just say 'thanks' and forget it. You are grateful when you spend time consciously being grateful for what has been given to you and what you still have. You savor it. You relish it. It is a powerful and ongoing experience. 

I think a feast of the Corpus Christi is appropriate for this. The Lord's Supper isn't just something that Jesus did, and we simply remember. The Lord's Supper creates, recreates, and sustains our living union with the crucified risen One, and we are bound to each other in him. That for which we are grateful is not just in the past. It is still happening now, and it will never stop.

We do give thanks to God for the whole mystery of it. But – we are not the only ones giving thanks. Jesus is too. 'While they were eating, Jesus took bread, gave thanks and broke it, and gave it to his disciples... he took the cup, gave thanks and offered it to them...' He is the one who has always been giving thanks. He is not casually grateful because someone has given him food and drink. He is grateful for God's call to him to give himself as food and drink to us. He thanks God for letting the bread be his body for us – his body which gives us new life. He thanks God for letting the wine be his blood for us, as we drink it and enter the covenant. He is always giving thanks. 

I invite you to join your fellow parishioners next Sunday in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Whether you can join us for thirty minutes or an hour, your presence will help us look upon the sacred host as more than a meal. It is a time to remember - to remember Christ's supreme sacrifice of himself on the cross, to remember the gift of himself as food and drink, to remember that as we say 'amen,' 'yes' to the Body of Christ, we acknowledge the community that is the Body of Christ. It is a time to remember our hunger to be part of the table before our First Communion and our hunger during the pandemic when we could not gather publicly to celebrate the Eucharist. Let our remembering give meaning and direction to our lives. The deeper we go with our remembering, the more our lives make sense, and the more we draw life from him. 

Blessings!!