Tag: Corpus Christi

Alleluia: Living Bread

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Creation, Eternal Life, Faith, Jesus, Love, spiritualityLeave a comment

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
June 19, 2022

Today’s Readings:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/061922.cfm

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we celebrate the most intimate and sacred feast of “Corpus Christi”, as we called it in our Latinized “old days”. In those days, we tried very hard to celebrate the feast in the best way we knew how — processions, hymns, exposition of the Blessed Sacrament. Yet nothing did, nor ever will, come close to capturing the mystery we honor on this holy day.

Alleluia, alleluia.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven,
says the Lord;
whoever eats this bread will live forever.

The items of faith contained in this short verse are earth-shattering. We are asked to believe that Jesus

  • came down from heaven
  • is the visible Presence of the infinite Love of God
  • lives on with in the Eucharist and in the community of the Church
  • grants us a share in eternal life
  • and is present to us beyond time, space, and appearances

The mystery of the Body of Christ/Living Bread is infinite and profound. Great minds such as Pierre Teilhard deChardin spent entire lives plumbing its depths.

When one understands how physical and immediate is the omni-influence of Christ, the vigor assumed by every detail of the Christian life is quite astonishing; it gains an emphasis never dreamt of by those who are frightened of the realistic view of the mystery of the Incarnation.

Take charity, for example, that complete change of attitude so insistently taught by Christ. It has nothing in common with our colorless philanthropy, but represents the essential affinity which brings human beings closer together, not in the superficial sphere of sensible affections or earthly interests, but in building up the pleroma (the fullness of God in Creation.).

The possibility, and even the obligation of doing everything for God are no longer based solely on the virtue of obedience, or solely on the moral value of intention; they can be explained, in short, only by the marvelous grace, instilled into every human effort, no matter how material, of effectively cooperating, through its physical result, in the fulfillment of the body of Christ.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin in Christianity and Evolution

As I pray this rather heady passage from de Chardin, I reflect on these thoughts:

  • All Creation generates from God and returns to God in the fullness of Love.
  • Jesus Christ is the visible gift of that Love born into our human story.
  • By our faith in Jesus, and our choice to participate in his life, we become part of the ongoing perfection of Creation.
  • The Body of Christ, once present in the flesh in time, now sanctifies Creation through our lives, united in the Bread of Life.

No poetry today. Slowly read and re-read the passage from de Chardin. Find it’s message for you … perhaps just a word or a phrase:

  • the omni-influence of Christ
  • charity, …. that complete change of attitude so insistently taught by Christ
  • nothing in common with our colorless philanthropy
  • building up the fullness of God in Creation
  • the marvelous grace… of effectively cooperating … in the fulfillment of the Body of Christ

Music: Benedictus – Karl Jenkins

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith, Jesus, Poetry, PrayerLeave a comment

Sunday, June 6, 202

Today’s Readings

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. 

We just called it “Corpus Christi” when I was young. Many of us, of a “certain age”, will remember the extravagant processions through our childhood neighborhoods, the garmented priest carrying the elevated monstrance.

Bishop Kevin Rhoades leads the procession as it leaves St. Thomas church in Elkhart Indiana Sunday June 18, 2017. Today’s Catholic Photo/Joe Raymond)

Little children and adults accompanied the journeying Christ who blessed our neighbors, families, businesses and playgrounds.

Although, for some, such devotional practices have changed since that time, I was still deeply moved when, during the depth of the current pandemic, Pope Francis stood alone to raise the monstrance in blessing over a starkly empty St. Peter’s Square.

Certainly, all our neighborhoods today could use such a blessing. And, it is we – the People of God and living Body of Christ – who must carry Christ’s Presence to our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and commonplaces.

Our Responsorial Psalm today offers us this question:

How shall I make a return to the LORD
    for all the good God has done for me?

Psalm 116:12

Maybe this is one way to hear that question on this Feast:

How will I carry Christ into my world today?

Poetry: Love’s Choice by Malcolm Guite

This bread is light, dissolving, almost air,
A little visitation on my tongue,
A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there.

This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung
A moment to the palate’s roof and fled,
Even its aftertaste a memory.

Yet this is how He comes. 
Through wine and bread
Love chooses to be emptied into me.

He does not come in unimagined light
Too bright to be denied, too absolute
For consciousness, too strong for sight,

Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute;
Chooses instead to seep into each sense,
To dye himself into experience.

Music: Pange Lingua written by St. Thomas Aquinas

Lauda Sion: Eucharistic Gratitude

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Faith1 Comment

Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ
June 14, 2020

Click here for readings

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy, and on this solemn feast, we pray with the ancient sequence Lauda Sion.

This laudatory prayer was written by St.Thomas Aquinas around 1264, at the request of Pope Urban IV for a new Mass for the feast of Corpus Christi. St. Thomas also wrote four more magnificent hymns for the feast: Pange Lingua, Sacris solemniis, Adoro Te Devote, and Verbum supernum prodiens which are all prayed during the Divine Office.

Lauda Sion repeatedly affirms our belief in Christ’s Presence in the consecrated Bread and Wine. In lovely, poetic meter, the Sequence presents erudite theology in accessible, memorable form. It is an amazing work of art and pedagogy!

After reading through the entire piece, we might choose one or two verses which resound with our personal Eucharistic devotion. In these times when many of us find our liturgical participation limited, the words of this Sequence are particularly poignant.

These verses from the beginning and end of the Sequence are some of my favorites. The various English translations are masterful, but never capture the complete essence of the Latin which I have therefore included here.

Special theme for glad thanksgiving
Is the quick’ning and the living
Bread today before you set:
From his hands of old partaken,
As we know, by faith unshaken,
Where the Twelve at supper met.

Laudis thema speciális,
Panis vivus et vitális,
Hódie propónitur.
Quem in sacræ mensa cœnæ,
Turbæ fratrum duodénæ
Datum non ambígitur

Very bread, good shepherd, tend us,
Jesu, of your love befriend us,
You refresh us, you defend us,
Your eternal goodness send us
In the land of life to see.
You who all things can and know,
Who on earth such food bestow,
Grant us with your saints, though lowest,
Where the heav’nly feast you show,
Fellow heirs and guests to be. Amen. Alleluia.

Bone pastor, panis vere,
Jesu, nostri miserére:
Tu nos pasce, nos tuére:
Tu nos bona fac vidére
In terra vivéntium.
Tu, qui cuncta scis et vales:
Qui nos pascis hic mortáles:
Tuos ibi commensáles,
Cohærédes et sodáles,
Fac sanctórum cívium. Amen. Alleluia.

Music:  Ecce Panis Angelorum – sung at the Papal Mass in Namugongo, Uganda.  The site is an open-air shrine to the Ugandan Martyrs, forty-five Christians burned alive in the 1880s on the orders of the king who feared the growing influence of Christianity.

This rendition of the hymn is the one I love from novitiate days. Though the video is shaky, it is wonderful to hear these African sisters and brothers singing with such obvious joy and devotion, in a language and with a faith that we can all share.

The Ultimate Gift

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Church, Community, Faith, Jesus1 Comment

The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Sunday, June 23, 2019

Click here for readings

Today, in Mercy, we celebrate a glorious feast, one through which we can trace the continuing evolution of Eucharistic theology.

CorpusJPG

Some of us will remember celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi, perhaps as children. The Host, carried in a beautiful monstrance, was processed through the neighborhood, bringing blessing to all who gathered.

process
Where did they get all those men!!!!

While a rare occurrence today, and considered by some a saccharine expression of devotionalism, the practice was intended to convey a central belief of our faith. It is a belief whose theology continues to evolve and deepen with the passing years:

In the gift of Eucharist,
Jesus Christ has made us
one Body with Him.
We are One Body in Christ.

A significant step in the evolution of this theology occured with the issuing of the encyclical MYSTICI CORPORIS CHRISTI ( Pope Pius XII, 1943). In this letter, we see a theology beginning to unfold to include not only Christ’s presence on the altar and in the Host, but in the very lives of the faithful.

The Sacrament of the Eucharist is itself a striking and wonderful figure of the unity of the Church, if we consider how in the bread to be consecrated many grains go to form one whole,and that in it the very Author of supernatural grace is given to us, so that through Him we may receive the spirit of charity in which we are bidden to live now no longer our own life but the life of Christ, and to love the Redeemer Himself in all the members of His social Body.

In his encyclical, ECCLESIA DE EUCHARISTIA (2003), Pope John Paul II, expands this teaching:

By the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the Church was born and set out upon the pathways of the world, yet a decisive moment in her taking shape was certainly the institution of the Eucharist in the Upper Room. Her foundation and wellspring is the whole Triduum paschale, but this is as it were gathered up, foreshadowed and “concentrated’ for ever in the gift of the Eucharist. In this gift Jesus Christ entrusted to his Church the perennial making present of the paschal mystery. With it he brought about a mysterious “oneness in time” between that Triduum and the passage of the centuries.

The infinite mystery of God’s relationship with us in Jesus Christ continues to call us to deeper understanding of our relationship with one another. Let us pray today for greater love and fuller surrender of our hearts to this awesome, self-emptying mystery.

At the heart of the Christian faith shines an open table without exclusion, where Christ is the chef, the host, and the food of life. The broken bread and the pouring wine manifests the Divine attitude to welcome especially the ones who are brokenhearted, neglected, rejected and crushed. And we are transformed into the body and blood of boundless and creative love, incorporated into the same divine DNA as everyone else – regardless of species, ethnicity, religion, gender, nationality, appearance, or social class. (Ivan Nicolleto)

(Brother Ivan Nicoletto, a Benedictine Camaldolese monk,  author and retreat director residing at Incarnation Monastery in Berkeley. He wrote Journey of Faith, Journey of the Universe. The Lectionary and the New Cosmology, published by Liturgical Press in 2015.)

Music: Somos El Cuerpo de Cristo- Jaime Cortez, Bob Hurd
(Lyrics below)

Somos el cuerpo de Cristo.
We are the body of Christ.
Hemos oído el llamado;
we’ve answered “Yes” to the call of the Lord.

Somos el cuerpo de Cristo.
We are the body of Christ.
Traemos su santo mensaje.
We come to bring the God’s News to the world.

Que nuestras acciones reflejen justicia;
Somos el cuerpo de Cristo.
Stopping abuse and relieving the hungry,
We are the body of Christ.

Vamos al mundo a cuidar su rebaño.
Somos el cuerpo de Cristo.
Serving each other we build up the kingdom;
We are the body of Christ.

Corpus Christi

On By Renee Yann, RSMIn Church, Community, Faith, Jesus1 Comment

Sunday, June 3, 2018 ~ Corpus Christi

Readings:  http://www.usccb.org/bible/readings/060318.cfm

Pange 6_3_18

 

Today, in Mercy, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. We just called it “Corpus Christi” when we were young. And I still do. Many of us, of a “certain age”, will remember the extravagant processions through our childhood neighborhoods, the garmented priest carrying the monstrance. Little children and adults accompanied the journeying Christ who blessed our neighbors, families, businesses and playgrounds.

Certainly, our neighborhoods today could use such a blessing. But the practice has become outdated in most parishes. Instead, it is we – the People of God and living Body of Christ – who must carry Christ’s Presence to our neighborhoods, workplaces, schools and commonplaces. How will you be Corpus Christi for the world today?

Music: Pange Lingua written by St. Thomas Aquinas