…The Eucharist and Openness to Growth…
(from an August 1, 1982 homily)

One of the most obvious and constant needs of any living creature on earth, including man, is food of one kind or another. . . The reason why we need food is because we grow. . . The hunger we feel as growing creatures is a gift from our Creator, ensuring that we seek food and so grow and change and improve as time goes on.

There are many occasions related in the Bible when God has intervened by miracles to provide food for His people when they were in particular need.  He has increased the harvest, or sent animals or birds along, or provided His people with manna in the desert.  In some cases, as with the miracle of the loaves and fishes, God has increased what was already available, feeding 5000 with just five barley loaves and two fish. The miracles of feeding about which we hear in Holy Scripture are all related to us in order to teach us something . . . Being living creatures on earth, our souls need to grow and develop and improve, and they need food for this.  They need to feed on knowledge and on love which come from God.  We have to grow spiritually if we are to be spiritually alive, and we have to feed our spirits if we are to enable them to grow.  We not only have to feed our souls on spiritual food, but we have to let them grow as a result.  It is not much good doing careful spiritual reading, listening to the word of God and to sermons and conferences, if we are not ready to allow our outlook and opinions and appreciation of religious truths to develop and grow and change and improve and, in some respects, to be corrected.  It is more important to grow spiritually than it is to grow physically, and in fact our spiritual growth and improvement must continue to the very end of our life on earth, even if we decline physically towards the end.

The Bread of Life which God gives us each week or each day by a miracle [at Mass] is not physical food designed to keep us alive physically or to make us grow physically.  It is spiritual food given to make us grow and develop and change in our consciousness and in our whole personality and character.  It is given to us so that we may grow more and more close to that spiritual maturity and perfection that will be our eternal life, the life of Christ Who is God’s Truth.  The fact that Jesus chose to give us Holy Communion in the visible form of food and drink makes it quite obvious that our meeting God in the Eucharist is not just a pleasant contact with God or an expression of our faith and love for Him.

If the Bread of Life, our Holy Communion, is to be food and nourish our spiritual life, it must make us grow spiritually.  Therefore it must make our outlook change and develop.  It must make our faith grow deeper and better informed.  It must make our good resolutions stronger and more prudent and more effective.  In fact, if we are to receive Our Lord when He comes to us under the sign of food, we shall not do so in the proper or fruitful way if we only accept the Sacred Host believing it to be the Body of Christ together with His Blood and Soul and Divinity.  We have to receive Our Lord,Who is really present in the Blessed Sacrament, in such a way that He becomes the Food of our souls, so that He is not only Jesus but the Bread of Life. . .

When Jesus first taught His followers the truth about the Bread of Life, [i.e. about] eating His Flesh and Blood, most of them left Him because they were, as devout Jews,  utterly scandalized at such an idea . . .

We must hold on the True Faith and be faithful Catholics and avoid heresy, which is very prevalent in Christian circles these days, but we must not preserve our orthodoxy in the faith by pickling it and sticking to it in a defensive, frightened way that prevents us from feeding our souls on remarkable new insights and emphases in the Church today.  It is not much good receiving Communion today with yesterday’s level and understanding of our belief. . .

It is not just freedom from affection for sin that prepares us for Communion, but readiness to learn and to unlearn, readiness to grow in spiritual understanding.  We receive Our Lord in order to grow into eternal life.  We do not receive Him as a static meeting or gift.  His real comforting presence is active and effective.  We must be ready to change and be changed and not be closed to every alteration in custom and teaching.  Not every new presentation of the truth is heresy, and even when thinkers do go over the border into error, there are often some very good and true insights mixed up with their excesses.  We must not so much defend the Faith as live it and develop it and let it grow.

Our Lord has the words of eternal life, but we cannot bear the full truth yet, so the Holy Spirit leads us gradually into all truth.  Jesus’ words are spirit and life.  Life involves growth, change—some of it painful—and development of ideas and expressions and motives and activities.  Let us be open to the words of Christ and the hidden riches in them gradually being unfolded as time goes on.

Receive Jesus with adoration and gratitude as God renews His miracles of feeding, and trust in Him to lead you to the truth in new ways and with new love.           

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