479. Solemnity of Corpus Christi (II)

Meditations no. 222 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The Solemnity of Corpus Christi invites us to offer reparation for the offences committed against the Blessed Sacrament.

Today, on the feast of Corpus Christi, we should make atonement to our Lord … We should tell him, in a robust way but at the same time with great love, how much we appreciate the faith he has given us. Tell him again and again that we believe in his Real Presence in the Sacred Host, where we know that he is hidden under the sacramental species with his Body, with his Blood, with his Soul, and with his Divinity. And thank the Blessed Trinity for deciding that the Son of God should take flesh in the most pure womb of our Blessed Lady, our Mother.

These were our Father’s words to his children on this solemnity in 1972. What he said then can serve as a guide for our prayer today. There will always be the need to offer atonement to God for the offences he suffers in the adorable Sacrament of the Altar. And we have to respond as our Founder suggests: We should each try to be more faithful to God, and tell him so. This is something very human, my children, and we are creatures of flesh and blood. If I tell you that, with our Lord’s grace, I love you dearly, doesn’t that make you happy? Well, it makes God happy too. So let’s tell him often that we love him and that we are grateful to him. Let’s ask him to forgive our weakness, our failings, and our mistakes; in a word, all the sins we’ve committed - we’re not going to be ashamed to call things by their name. And say sorry to him for the sins of the whole world, and beg him to have mercy on mankind and on the Church.

Put more love into your genuflection when you greet our Lord, as you come into or go out of the house. And even if you don’t say it out loud, tell him in your heart: “Jesus, I believe in you, I love you. Forgive your children, all of us, for not being more faithful.” Say whatever occurs to you at the time - I’m not going to tell you what to say as if you were three-year-olds. Each of you knows how to talk to our Lord personally; and if you haven’t done so up till now, you’ll soon learn.

We’ve spoken more than once about the personal aspirations that we each make up for ourselves. This is what they are: a word of praise, a cry of wonder, of joy, affection, enthusiasm - a cry of love! - that darts out from our soul like an arrow. It’s a way of “chatting up” our Lord, without any of the unpleasant connotations that phrase may have. It’s always a matter of love and self-giving.

Often going to the tabernacle.

I want you to love our Lord in the Blessed Eucharist a great deal, bearing in mind how neglected he is nowadays in so many tabernacles around the world. Certain people even say it quite brazenly: they don’t reserve the Holy Eucharist in the tabernacle any more.

Our Father said this in grief years ago, as he considered, in God’s presence, the way in which many Christians were clearly going astray. His words should be a stimulus for us now, to help us improve our Eucharistic piety, to love our Lord on behalf of those who do not love him, and to make reparation for those who offend him.

My dear children, you know for certain that Jesus Christ is present in our tabernacles, because your brothers the priests truly consecrate every day. So keep him company! There will often be times when you can’t go there physically, but you can always stay close beside him in your heart, in your desire. And another way we can keep close to him is by fulfilling our duties: study, work, rest, and so on.

I like to make comparisons with things on the human level that we can easily understand. Supposing that, instead of having given our whole heart to God as we have done - in the desire to serve him, and make reparation, and do good to the whole world - we had given our love to some other person instead. How often we’d find our mind and heart turning towards that person in the course of the day! “Where will they be now?” we would wonder. “What will they be doing?” The same thing happens to me with my children. When you go on a journey, I ask, twenty times a day, “Where will they be now? Will they have got there yet?” This is so natural, my children! There’s nothing odd about it; I’m acting perfectly normally, because we are a family and we love each other.

Go in your desire to every tabernacle on earth, and humbly ask our Lord to give us the strength we need to win this battle, because he’s already given us all the means to conquer. We should also, I insist, go to the tabernacle to ask Jesus not to look on us according to his justice, but according to his great mercy. Mercy in the sense of compassion - we should ask him to feel sorry for us, because we are so puny.

Today’s solemnity was instituted by the Church in order to offer public adoration to our Lord in the Eucharist, and to make atonement to him for the offences committed against the Blessed Sacrament. We - his daughters and sons in Opus Dei - cannot fail to add our voices to the prayers of the Church. Our Father insists on this. See, our Lord is always there in the tabernacle. He doesn’t seem to hear us, but really he’s listening to us with such enormous love, with the affection of a father and a mother, concealing his Divinity and Humanity alike. Our Lord speaks when he wants to, when we least expect it, and he says very definite things. And then he stops speaking, because he wants to see how our faith and loyalty will respond…

So don’t worry about the way you feel, or whether you feel anything at all, my children. If God allows you to feel the joy of his presence, good; but don’t ask for that. Ask him to give you clear ideas. Ask him for faith, which fills us with hope when God keeps silent, and together with hope makes us live by love. Not in flights of emotion like an adolescent, but in the reality of our self-denial and our loyal service, such as befit mature people. Service every day, which we may sometimes think monotonous; but it isn’t. You know very well that every day holds new light, and a different colour.

Our faith in Jesus Christ, reflected in our daily conduct.

My dear children, we need to reaffirm our faith in Jesus Christ, true God and true Man. Some years ago I had some tiles put up over my bed, with the aspiration Iesus Christus, Deus Homo (Jesus Christ, God and Man) written on them. I would like you to acquire the habit - naturally, almost without realizing it - of dwelling on Jesus Christ’s Divinity and his Humanity. Our faith teaches us that in him there is but one Divine Person, with two natures, the divine and the human.

Before the start of the Passion, Christ’s human nature already suffered and felt pain. Do you recall? Spiritus quidem promptus, caro vero infirma (the spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak), our Lord says. So there’s nothing strange in our hesitating sometimes, and having moments of weakness in our struggle. I really like talking about this struggle of ours because it’s the very condition of our life on earth, although plenty of people no longer want to struggle at all.

You know that I’m not in favour of wars between people - I love peace, and long for it But I’m very much in favour of the kind of fight we all have to wage against ourselves: that kind of war. I want you to win a lot of victories - to win them all! - and I want the same for myself. We can win, because we have such a powerful ally fighting on our side: God, who is close to us. Sufficit tibi gratia mea, my grace is enough for you, our Lord tells St Paul, when the Apostle feels the tug of his flesh and cries out: quis me liberabit de corpore mortis huius? - who will free me from the body of this death? My grace is enough for you!

As I was saying, this battle has an element of romance in that the outcome depends on us individually, as with the heroes of old. Two armies are drawn up face to face in full battle array: on one side, the devil with all his friends and servants - worldly things, pride, sensuality, and so on. On the other side stands each of us: not alone, because God our Lord is at our side, with his grace. If we keep our faith intact, and if that faith shows in the way we behave every day, we won’t be beaten. Because - and this example isn’t my own, it’s from one of the Fathers of the Church -the devil is like a dog that’s chained up; he may bark a lot, but if we don’t go near him he can’t bite us.

Personal struggle, then; face to face, without trying to hide in anonymity. Don’t think your fight is going to be along the lines of modern warfare, in which a little man who couldn’t even lift a couple of pounds’ weight off the ground, can destroy a whole city from some hidden place far away, just by pressing a button.

Now, and always, every single person will have to fight their own personal battle, knowing that everything depends on how they respond, and that God our Lord always gives us the means to conquer. So let’s fight those battles, my daughters and sons! Let’s win them all, with a lot of love; and if we should lose any, let’s get up straight away and start fighting again. Especially as we are fed every day on the Bread of Heaven, the Bread of Angels, which non mittendus canibus, is not to be thrown to the dogs …

The conclusion is obvious: we have to pray a lot. And for us, study is prayer, and going for a walk is prayer, and playing sports is prayer… and so too are the times when we escape, in our desire, to the prison, the mystical but real prison, of Jesus Christ in all the tabernacles around the world. Make use of this day especially, to love, to keep praying constantly, and to be joyful.

We finish our prayer today by asking our Lady to give us a heart that is filled with love, and the desire to atone for our own sins and for those of all mankind.