635. First Holy Communion of the Father (I)
Meditations no. 468 (unofficial computer-aided translation)
The presence of our Lord in the Eucharist should kindle our zeal for souls.
How many times we have gathered around the Tabernacleā¦ to do our prayer together about the Eucharist! It would seem that the topic would be exhausted, but Jesus Christ is a living fountain, with water that flows continually to bring everlasting life (John 4: 4). And today, why I donāt know - or rather you and I do know why - when we have to speak of Christ in the Eucharist, when we have to meditate on the immense love of our Lord, who has remained hidden under the sacramental species, we remember one of those parables which came from his lips during his three years of public life; a marvellous parable, a fruitful parable, the parable of the sower.
Today is the anniversary of the First Communion of the Father, and the family celebration of this feastday prompts us to join his thanksgiving, and leads us to pray more fervently for his intentions, the petitions which he brings before our Lord. At the same time, we recall the first time that Jesus Christ came sacramentally to each one of us, becoming the guest of our soul and embellishing it with his graces. And then, each time that we have received the Sacred Eucharist, that union has become ever more intimate, and Christ has filled us with the same eagerness to redeem: the hunger and thirst for souls, which are clear signs of our identification with Jesus. Therefore, we will do our prayer by following some words from our founder which encourage us to burn more and more with apostolic zeal.
Sometimes we have considered Jesus Christ who returns to sow and presses us in his wounded hand, soaks us with his Blood, purifies us, cleans us, inebriates us!, and then generously throws us, one by one, scattered across the world, as his children in Opus Dei ought to be, for wheat is not sown by the sackful, but grain by grain.
My children, the sower went out to sow his seed (Luke 8: 5) and today he reminds us that he went out to sow love. This morning I read some old verses written about the year 1200, when the Romance languages began to develop; I read those songs of the sowers, and this is what the reapers of the fields used to sing: this is the harvest of life; / this is the harvest of corn in full bloom.
When we think, my children, about the hunger for truth that there is in the world; about the nobility of so many hearts who have no light; about my weakness and your weakness and about the weakness of so many people, we have so many reasons to be dazzled by the light of our Lord; when we feel the need to sow the light of Christ so that it can become that harvest of life, that harvest of corn in full bloom, then we remember -and this is something that we have meditated on many times - when Christ was hungry on the roads of Palestine.
Our Lord, and the Holy Gospel tells us this, had nowhere to lay his head (cf Matt 18: 20), just like the poor people who followed him, whom he had chosen as Apostles.
Apart from Matthew, we donāt know whether the others owned much, but that Jesus was walking through the cornfields on the sabbath day. And his disciples, who were hungry, fell to plucking the ears of corn and eating them (Matt 12: 1). Like us now, they too would have reflected upon the need to spread the Good News while they walked through a wheat field rolling the full ears in their hands and hungrily eating the grains.
To bring Christ to the multitude, we must be contemplative souls.
Messis quidem multa (Matt 9: 37). The harvest, the crowd of men of that time and the men of times to come, was great. Messis quidem multa, operarii autem pauci (Ibid. ): The harvest is plentiful enough, but the labourers are few. Is this not what I have said so many times, in a thousand different ways, when we begin to consider the needs of the Work in this or that region, when there are difficulties, or the nearly physical impossibility of going to another country, or of launching a new undertaking because - although there are many - still more vocations are needed? Then I tell you that one must let time pass and go to our Lord: rogate ergo Dominum messis ut mittat operarios in messem suam (Matt9: 38), you must ask the Lord to whom the harvest belongs to send labourers out for the harvesting.
And today, when we are considering especially this marvel of the Eucharistic miracle, that food which you have left for our souls, it is natural, Lord, for me to change the track of the meditation to speak of the need to give you to the crowd, the crowd which does not know you and is empty of ideas, like animals, lost! because arms are needed, workers! who will labour in that harvest bringing your bread and your wordā¦
Caritas Christi urget nos (2 Cor 5: 14): it is your love, your words, your presence in the Sacred Host which urges us on. You have bound us, Lord, to all men with this dedication of yours, to go out in the midst of the crowd. And now we ask you especially for those souls who await the nourishment of bread, which is you, and the nourishment of the word, which is you, from these workers who are your children in Opus Dei.
To mingle the divine with the human a little - just like Jesus Christ, who is perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo (Athanasian Creed), perfect God and perfect Man, hidden in something as simple and needful as bread - I shall once again recall something from the beginnings of literature in my homeland, when Gonzalo de Berceo wrote his Christian poetry, when Alfonso the Wise wrote his songs in praise of Holy Mary. Since I was a lad, Lord, since the first time that I could cipher out that Galician poetry by Alfonso the Wise, I have been touched by the memory of some of his lines.
Those songs moved me. There is one of a monk who asked Holy Mary in all simplicity to see heaven. He went to heaven in his prayer - all of us understand this; all my children understand this, all of them, because we are contemplative souls - and when he returned from his prayer, he could not recognise any of the monks in the monastery. Three centuries had passed! Now I understand this in a very special way, when I reflect that you have remained in the tabernacle for two thousand years so that I could adore you and love you and possess you, so that I could eat you and nourish myself from you, and sit at your table and even, even, become God-like!
What are three centuries for a soul in love? What are three centuries of suffering, three centuries of love, for a soul which has fallen in love? Gone in a flash! I can explain, Lord, how you have waited for two thousand years in the tabernacle. What I cannot explain is my coldness; what I cannot explain is that I have become used to this marvel, a marvel which seems so natural to me because I would have done the same as you have done, and I am but a poor manā¦
Perfectus Deus, perfectus Homo. Thank you, O Lord, for you have, with the marvel of your immense power and all the tenderness of your divine heart, satisfied all the needs of the poor human heart.
Asking our Lord in the tabernacle to send us more vocations.
I have here the words of a song, of a couplet written between the year 1200 and 1300: To whom shall I tell my sorrows, my sweet love? / To whom shall I tell my sorrows, if not to you? And I have already told you how we ought make our thanksgiving after Communion, a thanksgiving which seems short - sometimes a bare ten minutes - but which lasts the whole day long, because we are always in the presence of God, and without realising it, three centuries whiz past, like that monkā¦
To whom shall I tell my sorrows, if not to you? My children, I donāt know how they meditate elsewhere. Perhaps with nineteenth century sermons, full of florid beauty and eloquence. But I would like you and me to do our prayer this way every day: an affective prayer based on our humility, our self-knowledge and the greatness of God which takes us - in the middle of real life! - to push forward telling our sorrows, even singing our sorrows!, and to whom but to you, O Lord? It is a loving conversation which must not be interrupted even in times when we feel most distant from him, because our whole life is made up of couplets of divine love. O Lord, we have no fear of our personal wretchedness, our defects, when we have you, when they lead us to you in our humility, for you are the pole star of our life!
Let me ask this of you, my children. May we know how to use the goodness of the Lord, who is hidden in the tabernacle, to return to the beginning of this meditation of mine, a meditation which each one of you has been doing on his own, accompanying me, as I forge into the clatter of words the feelings I hold in my heart. And we will once again contemplate Christ the Man, hungry for a harvest, hungry for labourers for the harvest. More vocations! We need more vocations!ā¦ May people of all races come, and come in abundance; people who are well disposed, and very human, for if they are not human, we cannot make them divine. And we must be able to give them the necessary formation.
To whom shall I tell my sorrows, my sweet love? / To whom shall I tell my sorrows, if not to you?ā¦ My children, this is our life, to love. And this makes us be understanding, gives us a big heart, makes us feel and live that venite ad me omnes qui laboratis et onerati estis, et Ego reficiam vos (Matt 11: 28): come to me all you who are crushed with work and responsibility and I will give you rest. My children, let us not reject anyone, let us know how to pardon others, to live with others, to forgive others. Let us tell the truth clearly, without intending to hurt, even if we have to hurt from time to time, as the scalpel hurts, ad salutem, to heal souls.
I would like to finish. And, to bring myself to the heights of the language of that era when Latin was losing its status as a universal language, when the Romance languages were beginning, I would like to finish with praise to our Blessed Mother, the pure and spotless Virgin who brought you into the world, O Lord. I am led to say it, my sweet love: Blessed be the Mother who brought you into the world!