I have been thinking about you each and every day. I have been able to call so far, approximately eighty-five households. As I write this Kneemail, I probably have about eighty more calls to make. Please be patient with me. If you haven’t received a call from me it means I have gotten to your part of the alphabet or the parish office does not have your correct, updated phone. (Remember to email Sandra,
sandrak@stjamestxk.org, or me,
rdaly@saintjamestxk.org with your most current phone number.)
With respect to those phone calls, thankfully, everyone I have spoke to is doing well. I am grateful to God for that! The next thing people tell me is how much they enjoy that we internet stream the celebration of the Mass, but they miss being in the church near the Altar. Of course, the Holy Eucharist, or the Mass is central to our catholic Christian spirituality. Why is that?
There are many reasons. First and foremost, at the Mass we participate in the one, true and only Sacrifice of Christ on Calvary’s Cross. This is a difficult thing for our linear minds to comprehend. How can we participate in Calvary when His passion and death happened two-thousand ago? Each time we celebrate the Holy Eucharist we
remember (anamnesis – make present again) His death and resurrection until He comes again. We
are present at Calvary and the Empty Tomb in the Mass, because our participation is measured by God’s time,
kairos, and not measured in our chronological measuring of time,
kronos.
To us it seems like every Sunday is simply a linear procession through time. However, as I told you in my class on the Eucharist this past Fall, when we come into the Liturgy, we enter into the Mystery of God’s time and sanctifying space. At the Mass, the salvific power of Christ on the Cross continues to plead to the Father on our behalf for all sorts of conditions we as humans find ourselves in.
In each Mass the priest as the icon of Christ, offers to the Father the One Sacrifice of Praise. In our Rite I liturgy we say that Christ suffered death “upon the cross for our redemption; who made there, by his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world; and did institute, and in his holy Gospel command us to continue a perpetual memory of that his precious death and sacrifice, until his coming again.”
So, though we at this time cannot take the physical comfort of the Sacrament for our spiritual nourishment due to the medical protocols surrounding COVID-19, we can make a Spiritual Act of Communion. Christ comes into us just as acutely as He does through the Sacrament. He also comes just as powerfully into the lives of those Christians who do not have the Sacrament of His Body and Blood.
The question can be raised, “Well, then why do I need to even go to church, if Christ can come to me without me having to receive the Sacrament?” The answer to that is found in Christ call for us to enter into the community of His Mystical Body. He calls us into the fellowship of the Church so that we can bring others into that same fellowship. He commands us to make disciples of all nations, baptizing them and teaching them to obey all that He has command us.
In addition, because we are finite beings, we crave and long for touching and encountering others in a physical manner. All of us have had times of separation from loved ones and some of that time apart was lengthy. We did not stop longing for them. We held out for that day when we would be with them and they with us. It is difficult for me as a priest to see my spiritual family to be Sacramentally separated and apart from the object of their souls’ desire. I pray that this time where we are separated from that Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar will be shortened.
I encourage you to read more closely and pray most intently this Act of Spiritual Communion: