This is my body that is for you.

This is my body that is for you.... This cup is the new covenant in my blood. (1 Corinthians 11:24, 25) The Feast that Satisfies Our Hunger for the Infinite.

Today we celebrate the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, or Corpus Christi Sunday. In the second reading, St. Paul recounts the words of the Lord: "This is my body that is for you.... This cup is the new covenant in my blood." Ponder this prayer-fully: at the source and summit of everything we believe as Catholics is a mysterious food... a heavenly bread. This must mean that the very essence of our humanity is our hunger for Infinity. Fr. Harry Cronin, a Holy Cross priest, offers this reflection: ‘Christ is a determined and deliberate lover.

And this loving is done with bread. He loves in bread and wine. For the dimmest fool will know that bread and wine are for hunger and thirst. And if hunger is fed with this bread, and thirst is slaked with this wine, then hunger and thirst for us will be holy. For hunger and thirst, basic and brutal, will gently jostle us toward the embrace of God. It is blunt and simple. It needs only careful, clear telling. Our God in Christ has become food because our God in Christ knows inside his own flesh every sad, tear-filled tale of hunger and thirst. He knows that the greatest hungering ache is the hungering for our beginning: for that crack of love's lightning that shot us into being. Which we find only in bread.’ Lord, help us to find the satisfaction we yearn for in the bread you offer us. Amen. -Christopher West, Word Made Flesh: A Companion for Sunday Readings

Fr. Daniel