Corpus Christi

[cappie]

“Blessed, praised, and adored be our Lord Jesus Christ on his throne of glory and in the most Holy Sacrament of the altar, and in the hearts of all his faithful people. send us forth in the power of your Spirit, that we may proclaim your redeeming love to the world and continue forever in the risen life of Christ our Saviour;” So goes a prayer said by some priests immediately after Mass with the ministers or when they return to the sacristy.

Today we celebrate “The Body and Blood of Christ”, or “Corpus Christi”. It is a feast added to the calendar in the 13th century as a way to celebrate the institution of the Eucharist outside Holy Week.  Holy Thursday, of course, celebrates the institution of the Eucharist, but there’s so much going on otherwise that day that it was felt we needed another occasion to commemorate this event and in a more festive way than is possible in the shadows of the Passion.

All of the Post Communion prayers that we use during the year recognize the importance that the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist has for us, but there is one of those that I think particularly points up that importance in ways that go beyond our daily spiritual nourishment to touch on the cosmic dimensions of what takes place when we have participated in this Holy Sacrament.  That is the prayer that begins with the words, “God of abundance”.

When I was in seminary some 38 years ago one of the questions on a mid-term examination for  Liturgy class was to “write briefly what participation in the  Eucharist meant to you.”

My answer to that question was that “when I participate in the Holy Eucharist, especially at the moment of receiving Communion, whether I feel it or not, I am united with Christ and with all of God’s people in heaven and on earth.”  A few years ago when I prayed the Post Communion Prayer, “God of abundance”, for the first time, and said the words, “you have fed us with the bread of life and cup of salvation; you have united us with Christ and one another; and you have made us one with all your people in heaven and on earth,” I was struck with a strong recollection of that examination and the answer I had written to the question about what participation in the Holy Eucharist means to me.

Although I would have agreed with the truth conveyed by the final sentence of the prayer; “now send us out in the power of your Spirit, that we may proclaim your redeeming love to the world and continue forever in the risen life of Christ our Saviour;” at the time of that examination I would not have felt that truth with the conviction that it now holds for me.

What undergirds and validates those truths that I hold concerning the Eucharist is my conviction that our Lord Jesus Christ is really and truly present both in the sacramental elements of the consecrated Bread and Wine, and in the efficacy of the prayers that we offer when we gather to celebrate our Lord’s presence with us in this Blessed Sacrament.

Christ glorified in heaven, Christ glorified in the Sacrament, Christ glorified in human hearts. And, yet, not three Christs glorified, but one Christ glorified—Christ’s glories are one and indivisible, co-equal and co-eternal. None exists separately from the other. The Body and Blood of Christ in heaven, in the consecrated bread and wine and in human hearts is one and the same. We expose our blindness when we perform reverences before altars, tabernacles, monstrances and such and fail to see and honour Christ present in our neighbour. The same reverence is due them.  And didn’t Christ himself on that last night also genuflect before them and wash their feet?

Addendum: 

“This feast of Corpus Christi remembers the joy in Jesus’ institution of the Eucharist.  Here, some words of Dom Gregory Dix (1901-1952), an English monk and priest of Nashdom Abbey, an Anglican Benedictine community.  This excerpt comes from his massive tome, The Shape of the Liturgy, first published in 1945:

Was ever another command so obeyed?  For century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth.

And best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta Dei – the holy common people of God.”

The Shape of the Liturgy, by Gregory Dix (Dcre Press Westminster, 1945), pp. 744-745.