I’m grateful for this Saturday’s retreat on the Eucharist.  You’re welcome to join.  Of the12 retreats we do over the course of our Coracle Fellowship year, a full one of those is on Communion.  Of all the topics we could choose in the realm of spiritual formation and call to Kingdom action, we spend a full retreat exploring the meaning of this sacrament?  Yep.  Why?  I made a new friend last year, Christophe Lebreton, and he explains why.  Christophe was martyred in 1996 along with six of the other monks of Tibhirine, Algeria.  In his private journal, kept for the couple of years before his murder and published posthumously, he wrote, “If one understands the Eucharist, one understands everything.”

While visiting our daughter Iona at Loyola University Chicago two weeks ago along with Tara we took the opportunity to go to the Sunday service in the chapel on campus.  In an obviously Catholic setting, accompanied by a magisterial organ,  it was delightful to sing two hymns emerging from the Protestant tradition, “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” and “God of Grace, and God of Glory”.  During the administration of the Eucharist we sang another one, Pan de Vida.

The chorus is in Spanish, “Bread of Life, body of the Lord, holy cup of Christ the Redeemer.  His justice will transform us to be able to serve, because God is love.”  Yes!  That’s what it’s all about, not just the Eucharist but indeed the Christian life, feeding on Jesus in order to serve like Jesus, on the foundation that God is love.

The first verse, in English, is derived from John 13.1-5, “We are the dwelling of God, fragile and wounded and weak.  We are the body of Christ, called to be the compassion of God.”  There it is again, the reason for communion, to nourish our union with God and to be where God lives, to feed on the body of Christ in order that we Christians might be strengthened to be who we are–the body of Christ–and that so that we can incarnate the character of God in the world.

I’m sure I’m not alone that not every Sunday do I want to go to church.  But it’s not uncommon on those days that the hunger for communion compels me, and for all the other good reasons to go to church, that one tips the scale, and I go.

May God in God’s mercy lead us all more deeply into the mystery of this sacrament, this gift, that we might experience more deeply the mystery of “Christ in you, the hope of glory”. (Colossians 1.27)

PS:  We were delighted to share this service with Sister Jean Schmidt (see below on the left), 105 years old this year. Since the 1990s has been the chaplain for Loyola’s men’s basketball team and rose to national fame in 2018 when Loyola reached the Final Four, with Sister Jean present courtside for every game.  You can get to know her here in a beautiful brief video, or glean from her wisdom in her book, ​​Wake Up with Purpose!: What I’ve Learned in My First Hundred Years.