NB. The new pastor of Our Lady of the Rosary, Fr. Jonathan Hemelt, will be celebrating all of the Masses there through the month of August. I will return to OLR in September.
I can't think of a better reflection on the Feast of the Transfiguration that these paragraphs from BXVI brilliant 2007 post-synodal exhortation:
SACRAMENTUM CARITATIS
10.
In instituting the sacrament of the Eucharist, Jesus anticipates and
makes present the sacrifice of the Cross and the victory of the
resurrection. At the same time, He reveals that He Himself is the true sacrificial lamb, destined in the Father's plan from the foundation of the world, as we read in The First Letter of Peter. By placing His gift in this context, Jesus shows the
salvific meaning of His death and resurrection, a mystery which renews
history and the whole cosmos. The
institution of the Eucharist demonstrates how Jesus' death, for all its
violence and absurdity, became in Him a supreme act of love and
mankind's definitive deliverance from evil.
11. By His command to "do this in remembrance of me", He asks us to respond to His gift and to make it sacramentally
present. In these words the Lord expresses, as it were, His expectation
that the Church, born of His sacrifice, will receive this gift,
developing under the guidance of the Holy Spirit the liturgical form of
the sacrament. The remembrance of His perfect gift consists not in the
mere repetition of the Last Supper, but in the Eucharist itself, that
is, in the radical newness of Christian worship. In this way, Jesus left
us the task of entering into His "hour." "The Eucharist draws us into
Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the
incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of His self-giving." Jesus "draws us into Himself." The
substantial conversion of bread and wine into His body and blood
introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of
"nuclear fission," to use an image familiar to us today, which
penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a
process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the
transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all
in all.
23.
Certainly the ordained minister also acts "in the name of the whole
Church, when presenting to God the prayer of the Church, and above all
when offering the eucharistic sacrifice." As a result, priests
should be conscious of the fact that in their ministry they must never
put themselves or their personal opinions in first place, but Jesus
Christ. Any attempt to make themselves the center of the liturgical action contradicts their very identity as priests.
The priest is above all a servant of others, and he must continually
work at being a sign pointing to Christ, a docile instrument in the
Lord's hands. This is seen particularly in his humility in leading the
liturgical assembly, in obedience to the rite, uniting himself to it in
mind and heart, and avoiding anything that might give the impression of
an inordinate emphasis on his own personality.
36.
The "subject" of the liturgy's intrinsic beauty is Christ Himself,
risen and glorified in the Holy Spirit, who includes the Church in His
work. Here we can recall an evocative phrase of Saint Augustine
which strikingly describes this dynamic of faith proper to the
Eucharist. The great Bishop of Hippo, speaking specifically of the
eucharistic mystery, stresses the fact that Christ assimilates us to
Himself: "The bread you see on the altar, sanctified by the word of God,
is the body of Christ. The chalice, or rather, what the chalice
contains, sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. In
these signs, Christ the Lord willed to entrust to us His body and the
blood which He shed for the forgiveness of our sins. If you have
received them properly, you yourselves are what you have received." Consequently, "not only have we become Christians, we have become
Christ himself." We can thus contemplate God's mysterious
work, which brings about a profound unity between ourselves and the Lord
Jesus: "one should not believe that Christ is in the head but not in
the body; rather He is complete in the head and in the body."
46. Given the importance of the word of God, the quality of homilies needs to be improved. The
homily is "part of the liturgical action", and is meant to foster
a deeper understanding of the word of God, so that it can bear fruit in
the lives of the faithful. Hence ordained ministers must "prepare the
homily carefully, based on an adequate knowledge of Sacred Scripture". Generic and abstract homilies should be avoided. In particular, I
ask these ministers to preach in such a way that the homily closely
relates the proclamation of the word of God to the sacramental
celebration and the life of the community, so that the word of God
truly becomes the Church's vital nourishment and support. The
catechetical and paraenetic [moral instruction] aim of the homily should not be forgotten. During
the course of the liturgical year it is appropriate to offer the
faithful, prudently and on the basis of the three-year lectionary,
"thematic" homilies treating the great themes of the Christian faith, on
the basis of what has been authoritatively proposed by the Magisterium
in the four "pillars" of the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the
recent Compendium, namely: the profession of faith, the celebration of
the Christian mystery, life in Christ and Christian prayer.
82.
In discovering the beauty of the eucharistic form of the Christian
life, we are also led to reflect on the moral energy it provides for
sustaining the authentic freedom of the children of God. Here I wish to
take up a discussion that took place during the Synod about the
connection between the eucharistic form of life and moral
transformation. Pope
John Paul II stated that the moral life "has the value of a 'spiritual
worship', flowing from and nourished by that
inexhaustible source of holiness and glorification of God which is found
in the sacraments, especially in the Eucharist: by sharing in the
sacrifice of the Cross, the Christian partakes of Christ's self-giving
love and is equipped and committed to live this same charity in all his
thoughts and deeds". In a word, "'worship' itself,
eucharistic communion, includes the reality both of being loved and of
loving others in turn. A Eucharist which does not pass over into the
concrete practice of love is intrinsically fragmented".
This
appeal to the moral value of spiritual worship should not be
interpreted in a merely moralistic way. It is before all else the
joy-filled discovery of love at work in the hearts of those who accept
the Lord's gift, abandon themselves to him and thus find true freedom.
The moral transformation implicit in the new worship instituted by
Christ is a heartfelt yearning to respond to the Lord's love with one's
whole being, while remaining ever conscious of one's own weakness. This
is clearly reflected in the Gospel story of Zacchaeus.
After welcoming Jesus to his home, the tax collector is completely
changed: he decides to give half of his possessions to the poor and to
repay fourfold those whom he had defrauded. The
moral urgency born of welcoming Jesus into our lives is the fruit of
gratitude for having experienced the Lord's unmerited closeness.
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