Coming to the sacrament

September 15, 2020

The Lord has his Sacrament. It's very much like marriage.  The marriage act of husband and wife is a kind of sacrifice because the lover dies to himself and submits to the beloved.  The beloved dies to herself and submits to the lover, and out of that mutual death there comes the ecstasy of love. That is the sacrifice. Do a husband and wife have a love that is only manifested in that sacrificial act? Are there not any courtesies of companionship which would even surpass in the quiet silence the ecstasy of two in one flesh? As Maeterlinck said: A friend is one in whose presence you can keep silence. As a matter of fact, their happiness, one with another, depends upon the deep consciousness that each one is a sacrament of the other. So our Lord has a Sacrament.  He is really and truly present, Body and Blood, soul and divinity in the holy Eucharist. And if we know how to love, we become sensitive and responsive, and when we come into visit him, he will talk to us. We take on his likeness; as Moses' face shone because he was with God. So, too, St. Paul tells us that we grow in splendor because we are in the presence of God.  Moses' splendor grew as he returned again to the mountain; this splendor rises in us, because we return to Christ. We reflect, says St. Paul, as in a mirror, the splendor of the Lord, and thus we are transfigured into his likeness, from splendor to splendor. That is what the Eucharist does.