Today's blog is less a blog, and more a gathering together of various fragments, as I attempt to make sense of the past week. For several days TV and social media have filled my screens with two divergent stories. There are the Paris Olympics, filled with strength and speed and agility - and grace, too. Physical grace, of course, but also the grace and graciousness of rivals embracing on the finish line; of losers congratulating winners. And alongside this, the violence and hate, darkness and destruction of this week's riots. And if I'd thought that looting and brick-throwing, destroying vehicles and a library, and torching a Citizens Advice Bureau were vile enough, then came the attempt to set fire to a building filled with terrified, traumatised people...
And somewhere in the midst of all this, though almost forgotten, a community mourns the senseless murders of three little girls.
And I sit with all this, and with my anguished incomprehension, trying to bring it all into my prayer, and into the wide and wounded Heart of Jesus (where, of course, the pain already is)... And some words from our 1994 General Chapter float through the back of my thoughts... The body broken and the blood poured out today...
Then to Sunday Mass, and after Communion we sing Bread of life, truth eternal and I am especially struck by the words Broken now to set us free. Here, surely, are those wounds through which we are healed. Back home, I open the 1994 Chapter document, and read -
the victims of violence
call us together to live Eucharist
as reconciliation.
This mystery of the body broken
and the blood poured out today
sends us to the world to be bread shared,
the real presence of the love of God for others.
And in here lies my call; lies our call, in the midst of a world in trauma and fragmentation. A call we must live together.
I began by saying this is a gathering of fragments; and that is how today's Gospel ends. Twelve baskets full of fragments, to be precise (Matthew 14:20); each leftover, gratuitous piece of bread or fish a sign of God's generous, extravagant love, revealed through Jesus.
What if each one of us could become a fragment of such love?
When I was a child I thought that the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist meant that the Bread and Wine became substantially the Body and Blood of Christ as though they were physically and chemically HIs Flesh and Blood. This is a misunderstanding, but it is often taught like this. But at the Last Supper, Jesus says, This is my Body, Broken for you, This is my Blood, poured out for you. Jesus comes to us in our brokenness. When we own our weakness, when we repent like the Prodigal Son, and come back to God, we allow Him in.
ReplyDeleteJesus is present in our brokenness, and in our being poured out like his Blood, which was shed for us.