Our Lord feeds us on His word and on His Body and Blood, and the closeness of our union with Him, which Holy Communion promises, depends to a considerable extent on the openness and conviction and conformity that we give in response to what He says to us.  How often we hear some very important truths taught by God and yet make hardly any positive effort to see what they imply or positive effort to live up to them.

What we are clearly told by God . . . is that we must never put ourselves first before anyone else.  We should always almost instinctively take the last place or the lowest place.  If we do not, we are making someone else take the last place or the lowest one, and that is not compatible with humility or with charity.  Whenever there is question of something being shared between a number of people, we should always take the least desirable share or part of it.  When we invite people to lunch, we should not seek those whose importance will give us prestige, but use another standard of judgment and decision.
These are just illustrations of the fact that if we want to receive Jesus, Who is meek and humble in heart, we must be humble in heart too, for in receiving Him it is we who have to conform to His mentality and not the other way around.  Our Lord knew that He was not just the greatest Man Who ever lived but . . . actually God in Person.  Yet He did not feel a hypocrite or in any way wrong to associate with people like us; to wash our feet, to put up with our dullness of heart, and even to die for us; to die for you.  He put Himself last of all mankind and accepted freely the greatest humiliation possible. . .

Humility and thanksgiving are closely connected, and the more we thank God for things, the less likely are we to attribute them to ourselves.  The more we look for personal glory in the gifts of God, the more ungrateful we are.  We steal what was for God’s glory . . . and try to use it to adorn ourselves in our own or other people’s eyes.  God only accepts the homage of the humble and the grateful, for otherwise we praise ourselves for giving Him homage. . .

We call the celebration of Holy Mass the Eucharist, an ancient word used by the early Christians and meaning “thanksgiving.”  The center of our life is thanksgiving, but thanksgiving for everything that is can only be given if we are humble and acknowledge the truth that we have nothing that has not been given to us by God and that we do not belong to ourselves. . .

Let us give thanks to the Lord our God in that humility which gives us confidence and peace.