Meet You in the Eucharist PLUS

Another journal from the Gethsemani... you think this one had anything to do with the influence of a semester abroad looming near?

Having just participated in the Eucharist with this community and taken the Body and Blood in the context of the monks' mass, I am inspired with new awe and thanksgiving for the miracle of Eucharist's mystical unity made possible by the Body of Christ--Jesus' body both in the power of the Eucharist and the Church and people He has gathered for Himself. The power of unity in Christ transcends space. The universal Church--our Catholic Church--includes common worship by all peoples in all parts of the world, so we are united not only with Christ and the rest of the congregation gathered right then and there but also with fellow believers stretched far and wide throughout God's world.

The extension of this that came to me in the sacrament today was that God cannot be limited by space OR TIME--He is timeless. So, in taking the Eucharist, I not only join in union with Christ, the congregation, and the believers of our Church worldwide/universally, I also enter into solidarity with a huge host of believers who came before me as well as those yet to come. God is timeless, so His Presence for us in the person of His Son in the Eucharist I believe is also timeless. By coming to us in His divinely-instituted sacrament, Jesus binds us together with the people who believed in Him as we look back into the past as well as those who will come into this world and follow Him in the future.

God is aware of and has ordained our world in a certain way--as Creator, the confines of time and space can be traced back to God's first movements to make our world from only Himself. But to God, time and space are nothing; they exist in the world He created for us to live in and praise Him in, but God's omnipotence, foreknowledge, and ordination transcend and exist above time and space. God's benevolence, care, and providence united and guide us eternally--at all times, in all time times, and beyond time.

So our Church, as the social organ of Christ's Body so established by Him in which we receive His Eucharist, gives us the means to access God well and enter into this limitless and timeless unity of solidarity with all our brothers and sisters of all time with Christ as our Head.