CORPUS CHRISTI 2007

There are a number of reasons why we come here each week. We come to praise and thank God for his presence and action in our lives. We come to be fed and nourished by the Word and the Eucharist and so become more effective witnesses to Jesus in the world. We come, too, to celebrate and build up the unity of the Body of Christ, which is the Church in St Matthew’s, so that our witnessing together as a community is more than our witnessing as single individuals. And we come so that, by prayer and reflection, we can shed the light of the Gospel on all that goes on in our lives and in the world, learning, through constant discernment, to interpret it and make sense of it all. And it’s this final reason that I want to focus on today as we reflect on the truly enormous change that has taken place, throughout the lifetime of many of us, in the way we think about the mystery of Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist, the whole reason for this thousand-year-old Feast of Corpus Christi.

The change has been quite dramatic. For many of us here our early attitudes were formed, not just by our experience of Mass, but perhaps even more by our experience of what we knew as ‘Benediction.’ As an altar boy, Benediction played a huge part in my early experience of what it was to be a Catholic. I’m sure it rained sometimes in Muirkirk, but the picture I have firmly fixed in my mind is of the smoke from the thurible drifting through the sun’s rays streaming through the windows of St Thomas’s Church on a Sunday evening. I can see it all now and hear the sound of the O Salutaris, the Tantum Ergo and the Divine Praises, not to mention hymns like Faith of Our Fathers, Full in the Panting Heart of Rome and Hail Glorious St Patrick, all of which were sung with great gusto and filled me, and I’m sure many of you in those days, with a deep sense of pride that we were Catholics and a profound sense of awe and amazement in the presence of that small, white, round host lifted up before us in the monstrance by the priest in his cope and humeral veil. This was Jesus, body blood, soul and divinity. He was present among us. We knew it and, unlike today, we never doubted it. I remember, too, the same sense of awe and wonder the day I made my First Communion and it was still with me sixteen years later when, as a newly ordained deacon in Spain, I exposed the Blessed Sacrament at Benediction myself for the first time and felt such an enormous sense of privilege. And then, of course, there were the great open-air Corpus Christi Processions. We never had them in Muirkirk – the parish was too small – but I know you did here in Kilmarnock, at Nazareth House, and invite you to remember them and be in touch today with the way people felt about them then.

Those days, of course, are gone. Jesus continues to be present among us in the Blessed Sacrament. His presence is real. That has not changed and never will. But what has changed is our attitude to it. Gone are the days when we had such a sense of it that we would never have dreamt of holding a conversation in Church. How many of us, for example, even think to genuflect now when we come into church and on quite a number of occasions in revcent years I have heard many outwardly ‘good’ Catholics ‘poo poo’ the whole idea of the Real Presence. Three times a week here in the church we have Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and have done for twenty years – a form of prayer the present Pope is very anxious that we rediscover – but only a handful come. And I know that the children who come for First Communion nowadays – not through any fault of their own - don’t have anything like the sense of awe and wonder I remember having at my First Communion in 1952. So why is this and how are we to make sense of it?

Well, you don’t have to worry. I’m not thinking of joining the Latin Mass Society. I don’t want to go back to the so-called good old days that weren’t actually as good as we think they were. But those who say that after Vatican Two we lost something are right. And one of the things we lost was that profound sense of mystery we felt at Benediction or during a solemn High Mass. There are certain truths that we can only access when the atmosphere is conducive to knowing them. A husband and wife will be much more in touch with their love for each other over a romantic candle-lit dinner to celebrate a wedding anniversary than during breakfast some Monday morning when the older weans are fighting, the baby is screaming and the school bus leaves in five minutes. And just as any couple who never take time to create that ‘right moment’ will gradually drift apart, so we, as a Church, have not in recent years developed enough ‘right moments’ around the Eucharist to stir the ancient faith of the Church in us. Personally I have no problem with people talking before or after Mass. Meeting other folk is one of the reasons we come. But I have often wondered if we should perhaps ring a bell a few minutes before Mass starts so that we can all quieten down and prepare ourselves internally for what we are about to do. The whole way we conduct ourselves throughout Mass matters. The way we sit, the way we kneel, the way we sing, the way we listen, the way we respond; all these things reveal our inner attitudes and, most importantly of all, communicate to the young faith, or lack of faith, in what we do.

Personally, I try hard every week to make our Mass a time of faith. Slowly but surely over the years we have deepened our understanding of Scripture. Better quality music has gradually replaced much of the rubbish which immediately followed the Council. But, in the end, what we need most of all is to become a more reflective contemplative people who see beyond the superficiality of our modern materialistic culture. The Feast of Corpus Christi will always be beyond the comprehension of such a culture and we need to understand that.

In 1989 I made a video for the parish in which I spoke of my dream that the day would come when this Church would be open all day for people to pray before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament….. Well, I’m still dreaming

BIDDING PRAYERS


The pre-Vatican Two Church, the Church of our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, had much about it that was good and much that was seriously in need of reform. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to know the difference so that we can let go of what belongs to the past and hold on to what is permanent, rediscovering it even in cases where it has been lost or forgotten over the years………..Lord hear us

Even old truths need to be expressed in new ways which make them accessible to people who live in a different age. We saw this at Pentecost when people from every nation on earth heard the Good News of the Gospel proclaimed in their own languages. The truth about Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist has always been expressed in the language of Greek philosophy as interpreted by theologians in the Middle Ages and we ask God to give us the wisdom we need to express the same truth again now in a language fit for our time………….Lord hear us

The Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist under the appearances of bread and wine is a mystery beyond human understanding. It can only be know through the gift of faith, the highest form of knowledge available to a human being. Faith takes us beyond the limits of intelligence and we ask God to stir it in us so that we can know without understanding the great mystery that we celebrate today………..Lord hear us

One of the things that has bedeviled our attitude to the Real Presence over the years has been the way we so often misunderstand what the Church teaches. Some devotion to the Eucharist has been based, for example, on the totally erroneous idea that Jesus is a prisoner in the tabernacle waiting for us to visit him. But the doctrine of the Church specifically teaches that Jesus is not present as in a place. His presence, though real, is of a different kind. And so we ask God to help us move beyond popular but false ideas about what the Church teaches in this area………Lord hear us

The Church’s current instruction on Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament – a form of prayer Pope Benedict is anxious that we rediscover – tells us that such prayer should always be linked to the Mass. It must be directed outwards, towards the world. It should not be inward looking but should encourage us to reach out to those in need and make Jesus present in every aspect of life. And so we pray that our prayer before the Blessed Sacrament here in this church will always do that……...……Lord hear us

It is important that we try each week to celebrate the liturgy of the Mass as well as we can. A faith-filled celebration builds up the community and draws us deeper and deeper into the mystery of Jesus death and resurrection as well as opening us up to the many far-reaching implications of his presence among us in Holy Communion. It slowly but surely makes us more like Jesus in the way we think and live and we ask for that grace today…………………………..Lord hear us