EUCHARIST

    We have listened to God’s word. And now, in the light of that word, we come to the altar, and the table is prepared for our holy meal, the Eucharist.

    As our gifts are brought to the altar--our monetary offerings, along with the bread and the wine --we are called to offer something more as well: our lives, our selves. We come before God with our strengths and our weaknesses, our struggles as well as our joys. We offer our lives to God to be transformed in the Eucharist even as our gifts of bread and wine will be transformed.

    The great prayer we are about to begin, the Eucharistic Prayer, is all about remembering—-“do this,” Jesus said, “in memory of me.” But this is a special kind of remembering which makes Jesus’s saving action present among us, here and now. Jesus is truly with us, just as he was with his disciples on the night of the Last Supper. It is still Jesus who takes the bread and wine, changes them into his body and blood, and shares his very self with us so that he can live with us and in us.

    As we give thanks to God in this amazing prayer, we are united: not only with each other, but with all the followers of Jesus throughout the world, through all generations, past, present, and future. In the Eucharist, we are caught up, for a moment, into God’s eternal now.

    “How holy this feast in which Christ is our food: his passion is recalled, grace fills our hearts, and we receive a pledge of the glory to come.”

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