Dear Parish Family,

In this digital age, one of the growing habit with young and old is creating a memory with an image. The growing number of gadgets that are used for selfies, automated photo sessions, drones that hover over our recreation scenes are being added on a daily basis. We can take a picture with our watch, we can even carry them all around with us on our phones and laptops.  We don’t just carry pictures.  We carry memories of people who were once a part of our lives.  There has been other ways to memorialize persons by naming streets/buildings after them, making statues and even making a holiday in their honor. Human being have this deep seated nostalgia for memory. This is the result of our being ‘wired-for-relationships’.

Jesus chose to be remembered with a meal, with food. He chose to be remembered with a meal, because it was the same way that God wanted the Passover to be remembered and celebrated.  The Passover meal, with its roasted lamb, and unleavened bread, and bitter herbs, and wine, maybe isn’t the way that we would have chosen to remember the Passover, but it was what God commanded the Jewish people to do.  With that background, it became a very natural progression for Jesus to proclaim that he was making a ‘new covenant’ of relationship by transforming bread into his body and wine into his blood.  This meal, this Eucharist, becomes our connection then to Jesus and to what He has done for each and every one of us!  And on this Feast Day, the Feast of the Holy Body and Blood of Christ, or what we used to call Corpus Christi, we celebrate this extraordinary gift, this remembrance, this monument to Christ’s love and promise to be with us always.

We need the Eucharist in our lives, so that we never forget Jesus and what He has done for us. At every Eucharist, Bread and Wine are transformed into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, of Jesus Christ. As Pope Benedict wrote: “To eat this Bread is to communicate, to enter into communion with the person of the living Lord. This communion, this act of "eating", is truly an encounter between two persons, it is allowing our lives to be penetrated by the life of the One who is the Lord, of the One who is our Creator and Redeemer”.
  Fr. Thomas Kunnel C.O.