Thursday, April 16, 2015

Our Strength And Our Food


In the humble signs of bread and wine, changed into his body and blood, Christ walks beside us as our strength and our food for the journey, and he enables us to become, for everyone, witnesses of hope. If, in the presence of this mystery, reason experiences its limits, the heart, enlightened by the grace of the Holy Spirit, clearly sees the response that is demanded, and bows low in adoration and unbounded love.

Let us make our own the words of Saint Thomas Aquinas, an eminent theologian and an impassioned poet of Christ in the Eucharist, and turn in hope to the contemplation of that goal to which our hearts aspire in their thirst for joy and peace:

Bone pastor, panis vere,

Iesu, nostri miserere...

Come then, good Shepherd, bread divine,

Still show to us thy mercy sign;

Oh, feed us, still keep us thine;

So we may see thy glories shine

in fields of immortality.

O thou, the wisest, mightiest, best,
                              Our present food, our future rest,

                              Come, make us each thy chosen guest,

                              Co-heirs of thine, and comrades blest
                              With saints whose dwelling is with thee.

               -St. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia

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