Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ Jesus, During this month of December, the month dedicated to the Immaculate Conception and the Infancy of Jesus, let us pray for the Grace our hearts need to be prepared for the coming Jesus at Christmas! Next Saturday, December 7, the St. Gianna Molla Guild members will host the annual Holiday Tea at St. Michael in Pine Island. I encourage you to support this annual fundraiser. This Sunday, I share with you a reflection on the beginning of Advent and Holy Communion. I encourage you to reflect over this message:
“Beginning of Advent - Preparing to Receive Jesus: The joy of Advent. The joy of receiving Our Lord in Holy Communion: Psalm 121… was a hymn sung by pilgrims as they approached Jerusalem: I was glad - chanted these pilgrims as they drew near the city - when they said to me:‘Let us go to the house of the Lord.’ Our feet have been standing within your gates, O Jerusalem! (Ps. 121:1-2)
This same joy is appropriate to the season of Advent, in that each passing day marks another step towards the celebration of our Redeemer’s birth. It is, moreover, a figure of the happiness we feel when we go, rightly disposed, to receive Holy Communion. It is inevitable that along with this joy we should feel progressively more unworthy as the moment for receiving Our Lord comes closer. If we decide to receive, it is because He wishes to remain in the species of Bread and Wine precisely to serve as Food; and so He gives strength to the undernourished and the infirm. He is not there as a reward for the strong, but as a remedy for the weak. And we are all weak and in some degree ailing.
However thorough our preparation, it will appear to us insufficient and in no way adequate for the reception of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. St. John Chrysostom preached in such terms so that those who heard him might dispose themselves worthily to receive Holy Communion. Is it not ridiculous, he asks, to be so meticulous about bodily things when the Feast draws near, as to get out and prepare your best clothes days ahead…, and to deck yourself in your very finest, all the while paying not the slightest attention to your soul, which is abandoned, besmirched, squalid and utterly consumed by desire…? (St. John Chrysostom, Homily 6; PG 48, 276)
If we sometimes feel ‘cold’ emotionally, or otherwise find ourselves lacking in fervor, we ought not for that reason to refrain from going to Communion. We will get out of the state of numb insensibility we are in by making acts of Faith, Hope and Love and by praying for an increase in these supernatural virtues. If it is a matter of lukewarmness or of falling into a dullness of routine, we have it in our hands to extricate ourselves from this situation, since we can count on the help of Grace for our rehabilitation. But let us not confuse mere nervous or physical exhaustion or ordinary and inevitable tiredness with a deplorably genuine spiritual mediocrity or a pernicious routine that increases its grip on the soul day by day. Whoever makes no proper preparation, whoever makes no effort to avoid or dispel distractions when Jesus comes into his heart, will inevitably fall into lukewarmness. To go to Communion with our imagination deployed on distractions and our mind preoccupied with other thoughts is a recipe for dropping one’s spiritual temperature. To be lukewarm is to give no importance to the Sacrament we are receiving. The worthy reception of Our Lord’s Body will always be an opportunity to set ourselves aflame with Love. There will be those who say:‘that is exactly why I don’t go to Communion more often, because I realize my Love is cold…’ If you are cold, do you think it sensible to move away from the fire? Precisely because you feel your heart frozen you should go ‘more frequently’ to Holy Communion, provided you feel a sincere desire to Love Jesus Christ. ‘Go to Holy Communion’, says St. Bonaventure, ‘even when you feel lukewarm, leaving everything in God’s hands. The more my sickness debilitates me, the more urgently do I need a doctor.’ (St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Practice of Love for Jesus, 2) When we think of the God who awaits us we can joyfully sing in the inmost depths of our soul: I was glad when they said to me: Let us go to the house of the Lord…
Our Lord is also glad when He sees our efforts to dispose ourselves well to receive Him. Let us meditate on the means and on the thoughtful interest we take in our preparation for Holy Mass, by avoiding distractions and banishing any feeling of routine, so that our thanksgiving afterwards may be intense and loving, uniting us to Christ throughout the rest of the day.
Lord, I am not worthy… Humility in receiving the Blessed Sacrament. Getting ready to receive Our Lord, imitating the centurion of Capharnaum: The Gospel of Matthew 8:5-13 recalls the words of a gentile, a centurion in the Roman army.
These words: Domine non sum dingus - Lord, I am not worthy… have been included in the Liturgy of the Holy Mass since the early centuries of Christianity and Christians have always used them as the immediate preparation for Communion. The leading Jews of the town had asked Jesus to relieve the suffering of this non-Jew, this foreigner, by curing a very dear servant of his, who was, it seems, at the point of death. (cf. Luke 7:1- 10) The reason they wanted help for him was that this welldisposed stranger had built a synagogue for them, or had munificently donated the wherewithal to have it built.
When Jesus drew near to the house, the centurion uttered the words that are repeated in every Holy Mass (using the word ‘soul’ in place of ‘servant’): Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof; say but the word and my soul shall be healed. One word from Christ cures, purifies, comforts and fills with hope.
The centurion is a man of deep humility, generous, compassionate and with a high regard for Jesus. Since he is a gentile, he does not presume to go himself to Our Lord, but sends others whom he considers more worthy, that they may intercede for him. Humility, comments St. Augustine, was the door by which Our Lord entered to take possession of what was already His own. (St. Augustine, Sermon 6)
Faith, humility and refinement are united in this man’s soul. That is why the Church commends his example to us and uses his words as preparation for receiving Jesus when He comes to us in Holy Communion: Lord, I am not worthy…
The Church not only invites us to repeat his words, but also to imitate his dispositions of Faith, humility and refinement. We want to tell Jesus that we accept His unmerited and unique visit, repeated all over the world, which is made even to us, to each one of us. We want to tell Him also that we feel amazed and unworthy at such a response to our asking. But we feel happy too - happy at what He has granted to us and to the world. And we want also very much to tell Him that such a great marvel does not leave us indifferent and unmoved; it does not leave us with a tenuous and wavering Faith, but arouses in our hearts such a warmth of enthusiasm that it will never cease to burn in the hearts of those who truly believe. (St. Paul VI, Homily, 25 May 1967)
It is wonderful to see how the Roman officer of Capharnaum was doubly united to the Sacrament of the Eucharist. First, obviously, through his words, which priest and faithful say every day before Communion in the Holy Mass. And, secondly, because it was in the synagogue of Capharnaum, which the centurion had built, that Jesus first said that we must eat of His Body if we are to have Life within us: This is the Bread which has come down from Heaven - Jesus said - not such as our fathers ate and are dead; he who eats this Bread will live forever. And St. John adds: This He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capharnaum. (John 6:58-59)” (From: In Conversation with God by Francis Fernandez)
In Christ through Mary,
Fr. Kasel