Sunday, June 24, 2018
Saturday, June 23, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 18 Michael Dubruiel
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From Chapter 3 - Adore. Part 5
LE S S O N S LE A R N ED F RO M A T H REE -Y
E A R -O L D
My son Joseph
walked into the room while I was putting together the material for this
chapter. When he walked in I was having a difficult time coming up with a good
illustration for what “living in thanksgiving” means in the concrete and I
wasn’t thankful that he was bothering me. Then it struck me that the point of
living in thanksgiving is simply that what I might otherwise perceive as an
interruption becomes an intervention, once I adore God above all things.
God had sent
Joseph into my room. This hit me when I sent him away and he said “Thank you,”
as he went off. For a period of his young life he had the habit of saying
“thank you,” not after he had been given something that he was appreciative of
but rather
42
when he had been told to do something, I think he thought
that “thank you”meant “okay.”Yet this is exactly what living in thanksgiving
is, saying “thank you” to whatever God presents to us in the daily events of
our lives.
“ L I
V I N G I N T H A N K S G I V I N G ”
Living in thanksgiving literally means always having
gratitude on your lips.
The late great Orthodox liturgist
Alexander Schmemann felt that the meaning of “thanksgiving”— the literal
translation of the Greek word Eucharist —
had been lost on modern people. We tend to limit giving thanks to only those
things that we receive that we perceive as good.Yet Schmemann argues that for
the early church “giving thanks” was something the Christian did because the
Kingdom of God had been restored in Jesus Christ.
Our very inclusion in Christ is reason
enough to give thanks; the fact that God has spoken to us in the Word is
another reason to give thanks; the fact that Christ has saved us and shares his
Body and Blood with us is another reason to give thanks; and the fact that
Christ has given us a mission is yet another reason to give him thanks! In
fact,you will recognize that at the point in the celebration of the Eucharist
that each of these things is mentioned, we express our thanks, either as a
congregation, when we say, “Thanks be to God,” or through the presider, when he
says to God, “We give you thanks.”
Because of what Christ has done for us we
now have a vantage point in life that those who do not know Christ do not have.The
liturgy is a mystery of light, and we are on the mountaintop of the
Transfiguration and know that Jesus rises from the dead — that he is victorious
over our enemies. Therefore, as St. Paul tells the Thessalonians, we can “Give
thanks in all circumstances; for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus for
you” (1 Thessalonians 5:18).
43
LIVING THE E UCHARIST
Practice giving thanks to God at all times. Make it a habit
to step back when you judge something negatively and to ask God to help you to
see it in his will.
LIVING THE E UCHARIST
Practice giving thanks to God at all times. Make it a habit
to step back when you judge something negatively and to ask God to help you to
see it in his will.
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Friday, June 22, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 17 Michael Dubruiel
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From Chapter 3 - Adore. Part 4
G E T T I N G T
H E M
O S T O U T O F T H E E U C H A R I S T B Y A D O R I N G G O
D
From a positive standpoint, then, what can we do to adore
God in the Eucharist?
First we must foster a sense of reverence
for God.The actions in the Mass of kneeling, bowing, and beating our breasts
all have meaning. They cause us to consciously call to mind that God is present
and to focus all of our attention on what God wants of us at the present moment.
Second, we need to worship the Eucharist
outside of Mass in order to foster a deeper communion with our Eucharistic Lord
when we receive his awesome gift at Mass. When we actively worship Our Lord
Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament we grow in awareness of what it means to
receive him at Communion. Pope John Paul II has written about this as a
necessary element
41
to restoring an
awe of the precious gift of the Eucharist. A Franciscan friend recently told me
that when preaching about the Eucharist to young people, he begins by telling
them to “Be amazed,” paraphrasing the Holy Father’s injunction.
Coming aside
to reverence Christ in the Eucharist, realizing that he is before us, has the
same power to change us as he did to those who came into his earthly presence.
LIVING THE E UCHARIST
Try to find time to make a visit to a chapel or church to
adore the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Give Christ whatever time you have,
whether a little or a lot. Make acts of worship in his presence.
Consciously call to mind God’s presence throughout the day,
no matter where you are.
Third,we need
to understand what the Catechism of the Catholic Church calls “the implications
of faith in one God.” It means:
•
“Living in
thanksgiving” (CCC 224).
•
“Trusting God in every
circumstance” (CCC 227).
LIVING THE E UCHARIST
Try to find time to make a visit to a chapel or church to
adore the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. Give Christ whatever time you have,
whether a little or a lot. Make acts of worship in his presence.
Consciously call to mind God’s presence throughout the day,
no matter where you are.
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Thursday, June 21, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 16
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From Chapter 3 - Adore. Part 3
A C O M M A N D M E N T
In 1989 something happened to me that I still think a lot
about. I had come into our parish church in order to obtain the Blessed
Sacrament to bring to the sick in the local hospital. As I approached the
sanctuary of the church, I knelt down to spend a few minutes of prayer before
setting out. It was then that something compelled me to prostrate myself on
that spot on the carpeted floor. This was something I had seldom done before.
So there I knelt with my hands and head pressed to the floor.
I felt something rough pressing into my
forehead. Raising my head from the floor and feeling my forehead,I found pieces
of the Eucharist (this parish used homemade unleavened bread at their Sunday
Masses, a type of bread that crumbled quite easily). Feeling around the floor,
I found more pieces of the Eucharist there. I picked them up and placed them
into the pyx that I was carrying with me and took them to the pastor of the
parish. The pastor immediately put a stop to the parish using the homemade
bread until they could find a way to keep this “abuse” of the Blessed Sacrament
from occurring.
This incident is noteworthy to me because
of the “impulse” that came over me to adore those unseen pieces of the Blessed
Sacrament on the floor.
In Scripture this impulse to adore
happens whenever someone comes into contact with a messenger of God, with an
event that reminds them of God, or with God himself in the person of
Jesus.Abraham does this in Genesis 18:2,Balaam does it in Numbers 22:31, Joshua
does it in Joshua 5:14, the blind man does it
39
to Jesus in John 9:38, and the disciples do it to Jesus in
Matthew 28:9. Those tempted to adore God’s works, however, are condemned in
Scripture.
When John falls down to worship an angel
in the Book of Revelation, the angel scolds him, “You must not do that! I am a
fellow servant with you and your brethren who hold the testimony of Jesus.
Worship God” (Revelation 19:10). Likewise, when Cornelius bows down to worship
Peter, he is told by the apostle, “Stand up; I too am a man” (Acts 10:26), and
when Paul and Barnabas are the recipients of unwanted worship they tear their
garments and beg the people to recognize that God alone is to be worshipped
(see Acts 14).
The point is that God alone is to be
adored. If you want to get the most out of the Eucharist you need to worship
the Lord! The first three commandments given to Moses emphasized the necessity
of worshiping God alone.
1. I
am the Lord your God: you shall not have strange Godsbefore me.
2. You
shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain.
3. Remember
to keep holy the Lord’s Day.
This means that we must not worship false
Gods. What are some of the false gods that can present themselves as “goods” at
the Eucharist? They are the same today as they would have been for those who
experienced Christ in the flesh:
1. Ideology: Liberal or
Conservative
In Jesus’s time the Sadducees and the Pharisees held rival
ideologies of how best to be a worshipper of God.Yet when God showed up in
their midst in the person of Jesus,neither group could accept him — Jesus
didn’t fit their image of God.
In our own time good and well-meaning
people fall into the same temptation, one that masks itself as a good but is
really a sin of pride. There are people who accept what the Holy Father
40
teaches on some issues but reject what he says on others
based not on whether it matches the truth of the gospels but rather on whether
it matches their ideology or what they wish God was like.
When it comes to the worship of God, we
must insure that it is God that we adore and not our own idea of who God is or
should be.
2. Looking for a Human Savior
Jesus is our savior. If we are looking for a priest, a
parish community, the perfect worship space, or excellent music — though all of
these are good things — we risk making an idol out of these things and missing
God, who is omnipresent. The effectiveness of the Eucharistic liturgy depends
upon God, not us. Reverencing Jesus — no matter how bad the preaching, music,
church building, or anything else that might be our personal pet peeve — puts
our focus where it belongs. Those who tried to worship the apostles were
scolded that this was not where their focus should be, but rather on God.
Ministers both clerical and lay need to remember this: none of us is the
savior; only Jesus holds that title.
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Wednesday, June 20, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 15
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From Chapter 3 - Adore. Part 2
When Jesus
came to visit the two sisters of Lazarus, the sister named Mary sat at Jesus’s
feet and listened to him while the other sister, Martha, feverously worked in
the kitchen to entertain their houseguest. Finally Martha came to Jesus and
complained about the fact that Mary wasn’t helping her. Wandering minds,
worriers, and a host of others don’t like what Jesus told Martha: “Martha,
Martha, you are anxious and troubled about many things; one thing is
needful.Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from
her” (Luke 10:41–42).
I was
discussing the topic of this book with a priest and he told me that in his many
years of presiding at the Eucharist in churches around the world he thought
that the organist was the most distracted member of almost every parish,
“always fiddling with the music for the next piece, kind of a visual mind
wandering.” It is easy to be caught up in worrying about doing a good job to
the point that we forget why we are doing the job. Jesus tells the Martha in
all of us, “One thing is needful.”
When we come
to the Eucharist, are we adoring God, or worshipping something else?
M
OUR SACRIFICE
.
AKE AN OFFERING OF ANY FALSE GODS
We give up anything that we think is more important than God.
G O D A
L O N E
Over the entrance
to the cloister of the Abbey of Gethsemane in Kentucky are two simple words
that are not simple at all in
M
OUR SACRIFICE
.
AKE AN OFFERING OF ANY FALSE GODS
We give up anything that we think is more important than God.
38
practice: God Alone. What really is necessary? God. What
truly is worth worrying about? Our relationship with God.
Jesus said, “One thing is needful.”
If you want to get the most out of the
Eucharist, adore God! Worship the One who can save you from whatever life may
bring, even death!
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Tuesday, June 19, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 14
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From Chapter 3 - Adore. Part 1
O come, let us worship and bow down, Let us kneel before the
Lord, our Maker!
— P SALM 9 5 : 6
The Baltimore
Catechism was used as a primary teaching tool when I was a child. Even
though I probably was taught with
it for only the first three or four
years of my Catholic education, like others before me I haven’t forgotten the
simple lessons it taught me, like:
35
O come, let us worship and bow down, Let us kneel before the
Lord, our Maker!
— P SALM 9 5 : 6
|
The Baltimore
Catechism was used as a primary teaching tool when I was a child. Even
though I probably was taught with
it for only the first three or four
years of my Catholic education, like others before me I haven’t forgotten the
simple lessons it taught me, like:
35
36
Q. Who is God?
A. God is the
Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
“All
things”includes me and everyone else on the earth,along with everything else
that I can perceive. God is the maker of all that is, and as such is the most
important Being that exists. My very existence depends upon God.
It follows
then,and this is from the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church,that “to
adore God is to acknowledge,in respect and absolute submission, the
‘nothingness of the creature’ who would not exist but for God.To adore God is
to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself” (CCC 2097).
W H E N Y
O U R M I N D WA N D E R S
One of the most
frequent complaints that people who genuinely want to get more out of the
Eucharist raise is that they find that their mind wanders at Mass. The cause of
their distraction may be as simple a question as “Did I turn off the car
lights?” or as weighty a concern as “I wonder how I’m going to pay the mortgage
or rent this month?” It is understandable, given the hectic pace of life, that
when we try to quiet ourselves in the presence of God we often find that our
minds are cluttered with many distracting thoughts.
H ELP FROM THE FATHERS
OF THE C HURCH
For often in the very sacrifice of praise urgent thoughts
press themselves upon us, that they should have force to carry off or pollute
what we are sacrificing in ourselves to God with weeping eyes. Whence when
Abraham at sunset was offering up the sacrifice, he was troubled by birds of
prey sweeping down on the carcasses, but he diligently drove them off,so that
they might not carry off the sacrifice being offered up (cf. Gen. 15:11). So
let us, when we offer a holocaust to God upon the altar of our hearts, keep it
from birds of
37
prey that the evil spirits and bad thoughts may not seize
upon that which our mind hopes it is offering up to God to a good end.
— S T. G REGORY THE G
REAT
Q. Who is God?
A. God is the
Creator of heaven and earth, and of all things.
“All
things”includes me and everyone else on the earth,along with everything else
that I can perceive. God is the maker of all that is, and as such is the most
important Being that exists. My very existence depends upon God.
It follows
then,and this is from the modern Catechism of the Catholic Church,that “to
adore God is to acknowledge,in respect and absolute submission, the
‘nothingness of the creature’ who would not exist but for God.To adore God is
to praise and exalt him and to humble oneself” (CCC 2097).
W H E N Y
O U R M I N D WA N D E R S
One of the most
frequent complaints that people who genuinely want to get more out of the
Eucharist raise is that they find that their mind wanders at Mass. The cause of
their distraction may be as simple a question as “Did I turn off the car
lights?” or as weighty a concern as “I wonder how I’m going to pay the mortgage
or rent this month?” It is understandable, given the hectic pace of life, that
when we try to quiet ourselves in the presence of God we often find that our
minds are cluttered with many distracting thoughts.
H ELP FROM THE FATHERS
OF THE C HURCH
For often in the very sacrifice of praise urgent thoughts
press themselves upon us, that they should have force to carry off or pollute
what we are sacrificing in ourselves to God with weeping eyes. Whence when
Abraham at sunset was offering up the sacrifice, he was troubled by birds of
prey sweeping down on the carcasses, but he diligently drove them off,so that
they might not carry off the sacrifice being offered up (cf. Gen. 15:11). So
let us, when we offer a holocaust to God upon the altar of our hearts, keep it
from birds of
prey that the evil spirits and bad thoughts may not seize
upon that which our mind hopes it is offering up to God to a good end.
— S T. G REGORY THE G
REAT
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Monday, June 18, 2018
How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist - part 13
From How to Get the Most Out of the Eucharist by Michael Dubruiel
From chapter 2 - Serve. Part 9
F U R T H E R H E L P S
1. Keep Your Focus on Jesus
Whenever you desire to “control” what happens in the
Eucharist, or suffer because you sense someone else is hijacking the liturgy,
•
Think of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples.
•
Think of Jesus telling his followers to take up their
crossand follow him.
•
Think of Jesus saying that he did not come to be
servedbut to serve.
Keeping your focus on Christ will prevent
the devil in his attempts to distract you from the purpose of the Eucharist.
2. Learn from the Blessed Virgin Mary
Following the example of the Blessed
Virgin Mary we declare ourselves at God’s service. “Behold, I am the handmaid
of the Lord” (Luke 1:38) was Mary’s response to the Angel Gabriel’s
32
announcement that God would become incarnate within her.
When we come to the Eucharist, God desires to continue the incarnation within
us, and Mary teaches us how we should approach so great a gift.
Mary’s reaction to the angel’s message
gives a supreme example of the sacrifice we can bring to every celebration of
the Eucharist. When confronted with anything that does not go according to our
plans,we need to open ourselves up to what God might be asking of us.
3. Foster an Attitude of Service
When Joshua realized that he was being confronted by a
messenger of God, someone who at first he was not sure was a friend, he asked,
“What does my Lord bid his servant” (Joshua 5:14)?
When we have the right stance toward God
in our worship this is the question we will ask when confronted by anything
that disturbs us: “What does my Lord bid his servant”?
4. Developing a Eucharistic Spirituality
Empowered by Christ, we should seek to serve God and anyone
God places in our path throughout the day. “How may I serve you?” should be the
question ever on our lips, whether at home, at work, or in recreation. We can
find concrete ways to serve Christ in the many guises in which he comes to us
in the poor and the weak.
5. A Prayer for Today
These beautiful words of St. Augustine, taken from his
Soliloquies, may help you to ask God for the grace to offer yourself, so to be
at his service:
33
O God, at last
You alone do I love, You alone I follow, You alone I seek, You alone am I
prepared to serve, for You alone by right are Ruler, under your rule do I
desire to be. Direct, I pray, and command whatever You will, but heal and open
my ears, that I may hear Your utterances. Heal and open my eyes, that I may
behold Your signs. Drive delusion from me, that I may recognize You.Tell me
where I must go, to behold You, and I hope that I shall do all things that You
command. O Lord, most merciful Father, receive, I pray, Your fugitive; enough
already, surely, have I been punished, long enough have I served Your
enemies,whom You have under Your feet, long enough have I been a sport of
falsehood.Receive me fleeing from these, Your house-born servant, for did not
these receive me,though another Master’s,when I was fleeing from You? To You I
feel I must return: I knock; may Thy door be opened to me; teach me the way to
You. Nothing else have I than the will: nothing else do I know than that
fleeting and falling things are to be spurned, fixed and everlasting things to
be sought.This I do, Father, because this alone I know, but from what place to
approach You I do not know. Instruct me, show me, give me all that I need for
the journey. If it is by faith that those find You, who take refuge with You
then grant faith: if by virtue, virtue: if by knowledge, knowledge. Fill me
with faith, hope, and charity. O goodness, singular and most to be admired!8
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