Welcome to Finding God in Our Hearts. The following production Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a weekly program of deep spiritual insight on Scripture, revealing the indwelling presence of God. Monsignor Fisher is a Catholic priest, a member of the Diocese of Dallas, and founder of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a nonprofit in Dallas, Texas, dedicated to to enriching your spiritual journey. We appreciate your listenership and if you find this program valuable, please subscribe and share with your friends. This program is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you make your donation@pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com Good morning. Today we celebrate the most holy body and Blood of Christ, the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Opening Prayer O God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray so, to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption. Who lives and reigns with God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen. A reading from the Old Testament the book of Genesis 14:18 20 in those days Melchizedek, the king of Salem, brought out bread and wine, and being a priest of God most High, he blessed Abram with these words. Blessed be Abram by God most High, the Creator of heaven and earth, and blessed be God Most High, who delivered your foes into your hands. And Abram gave him a tenth of everything, the Word of the Lord.

You are a priest forever in the line of Melchizedek. A Reading from the New Testament from St. Paul’s letter first letter to the Corinthians 11:23 26 Brothers and sisters, I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, this is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me. In the same way also the cup after supper, saying, this cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this as often as you drink it in remembrance of me.

For as often as you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes the word of the Lord. Hallelujah. Verse I am the living bread that came down from heaven, says the Lord. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. The Gospel for this feast is taken from St. Luke 9:11 to the 17th verse.

Jesus spoke to the crowds about the kingdom of God, and he healed those who needed to be cured. As the day was drawing to a close, the 12 approached him and said, Dismiss the crowds so that they can go to the surrounding villages and farms and find lodgings and provisions for we are in a deserted place. He said to them, give them some food yourselves. They replied, five loaves and two fish are all we have unless we ourselves go and buy food for all these people. Now the men there numbered about 5,000. Then he said to the disciples, have them sit down in groups of about 50.

They did so and made them all sit down. Then taking the five loaves and the two fish and looking up to heaven, he said the blessing over them, broke them, and gave them to the disciples to set before the crowd. They all ate and were satisfied. When the leftover fragments were picked up, they filled 12 wicker baskets. The gospel of the Lord, Satan sa my priesthood has enabled me to do, of all the times in which I feel most like a priest, is when I celebrate the liturgy, the Eucharist. And it’s a two fold ceremony.

As you know, there’s the Liturgy of the Word, that ritual, and the liturgy, ritual of the Eucharist. And when I was ordained, I think I really thought in my heart that I was going to be so empowered. And I have been empowered to use sacraments to, to minister to people. It was my way of bringing God to people through a sacrament. But then I realized as soon as I was ordained that there was another, even perhaps more a bigger responsibility. And that was to do that first part, the Liturgy of the Word.

In other words, preaching. So in a way, when you come to Mass, you’re watching a priest do his two most essential things. He is helping you understand the mystery of what is hidden in these stories, opening your eyes to what is true, guiding you to a place of peace and fullness. And then he becomes this mystical character, this Christ figure. And we wear special clothes that fit more the clothes that Jesus would have worn. And we go through this ritual.

And it’s easy to make it wrote for a priest or for the people there, because it’s written. It’s not a spontaneous experience of the priest’s own faith like a homily is, but there’s something when you go into it and you let it take over, it’s like you drift into a place of reflection that’s so sweet and powerful. And then the coolest part of it is you come forward and you eat this bread. And the fullness of the celebration of Eucharist is when you also offer the cup to everyone present. So you drink this wine, you do it. And the words around the Eucharist, around the Experience of preparing the community, or how the community is experiencing the preparation that the liturgy itself gives them.

It’s so beautiful because it keeps saying over and over again, and these were. When I was growing up, all these prayers were in Latin. And even when I was ordained, part of them were in Latin and part of them were in English. But those prayers, the meaning of those prayers were always hidden from me as a young child. But they’re so beautiful in terms of saying something over and over again. Before you receive the Eucharist, you are forgiven.

You are forgiven, you are forgiven. The reason that seems so important to me is when I was growing up, the Eucharist was a kind of exercise wherein you were showing God that you had done everything you can to free yourself of sin and imperfection by going to confession, which was not necessarily demanded, but it was considered to be a really wonderful devotional practice. You’d go to confession on Saturday night and go to communion on Sunday, and so many times people wouldn’t go to communion. You say, why didn’t you go to Communion? Well, I haven’t gone to confession lately. So there was an image of you had to be pure and clean before you could receive the Eucharist.

And yet somehow in the ritual, when you read it, you say, well, wait a minute, then why all these words about, you’re forgiven, you’re forgiven, you’re forgiven. It doesn’t say, blessed are those who have gone to confession and now come forward. In fact, there are times when a priest will feel obligated to say to a congregation, don’t come forward unless you’re totally prepared and have no sin on your soul. Well, the problem with that is the definition people have of sin. If sin is an imperfection, which it is for most people, it’s our humanity showing itself. It’s almost like saying, well, if you’re human and you really need the help of this Eucharist, don’t come unless you’ve got it all worked out, or something like that.

I mean, really, this is food for sinners, for people struggling. The church has always required reconciliation for what we call mortal sin, which is a very, very severe fracture in your relationship with God. It’s not a fault, it’s not a weak. It’s a well planned, well intended decision that says, I will do a violent, horrible thing to my relationship with God. I will cut God out of my life. Then you need the prayer of the Church to reconcile you.

That’s confession. But for most people, at least, my experience with confession is people are not confessing other than their humanity. So I want to talk about that. The relationship between going to the Eucharist after listening to the powerful images in Scripture and what’s in your heart. When you think about what you’re about to do, the easiest thing to happen is you just do it because it’s time to do it. Like, you stand when you stand, you kneel.

When you kneel, you go forward and get the Eucharist. You come back and it’s rather rote and not very conscious. And of course, that’s just human nature gets into that rut. But no, for it to work, for anything to work in terms of the spiritual world, you need consciousness and you need to know what you’re doing. You need to be open to the mystery that is being effected in you at that moment. That’s the way it works.

I know what this is. I believe that this is what it’s supposed to be. And I want what it is that it’s going to offer me. And I humbly receive it. And I’m so thankful for receiving it. It’s funny, the word thankful is just so perfect for Eucharist because there’s nothing else you can say to God when he says, I have chosen to come and dwell within you.

My body, my existence is for you. And this life force that’s in me, I want it to be in you. My body, my blood in you. I mean, how do you. Oh, thanks. No, it’s overwhelming when you think about it.

And it’s not saying I come to you in your perfection. No, I come to you in your humanity, your humanity. All the stuff that makes you you and me, me. The really wonderful gifts that some of us, all of us have some gifts for some reason, I mean, some way for the good of all those around us. But some are gifted more than others. But if you see your life as itself a gift to the people around you, and you understand that what Eucharist is asking you to do is to receive this incredible gift, God’s presence inside of you, his life coursing through your veins.

Which means somehow you, as a human being, in your humanity, you carry God into the world. That’s the issue. You become his vessel, his carrier of what he brings. And what does he bring? I mean, the most beautiful thing is clear in the ministry of Jesus when, I mean, what was he so noted for? What was the church so upset about what he was doing?

Because he was doing things that didn’t. Were completely out of the Church’s control, the temple’s control. And people just got better. They were healed. They just. I don’t know.

I love that image. He goes everywhere. They were healed. And, you know, I always thought, well, he did some pretty amazing healings where it was, you know, cripples and blind people. But those are all images of the inability we have when we’re caught in an illusion where we can’t work, we can’t get to where we need to get to. The withered hand, we can’t do the work we’re called to do, the opened eyes.

We’re not able to see what we need to see most. Especially one of the things we need to see is how blind we are in certain areas so that we can invite the light of this presence of God inside of us to enlighten us and show us things. But what I want you to feel is not what I used to feel as a child, that I had to be pure and fixed before God would enter into me. That is the biggest misconception I received. Partly my fault, I guess. Partly was maybe what my parents felt.

I don’t know. It was never the official teaching of the Church, literally, but I got it. I get this feeling that, in fact, maybe it was because I had to fast. And you couldn’t have food in your stomach. You couldn’t touch the Eucharist with any part of your body, not even your teeth. You had to just let it melt on your tongue into your empty, clean stomach.

And there was even a cloth they would put over your hands just in case a little piece of particle would touch your contaminated, sinful body. That’s what it felt like. And all that’s gone, thank God with Vatican Council, we can touch it. We can be given it. It’s given to us. We put it in our hand like in a throne, and we pick it up and we put it in our mouth and we can chew it, we can eat it, we can go and it was impossible to think you could ever drink the blood.

Only a priest could do that. You can go and receive the cup and hold it and drink it, taste the wine. It’s wonderful. It’s sensual. But the most interesting thing is not that it has all those qualities of what I think God wants us to sense when he says, I want to come to you. It’s not like I’m just going to dwell as this little mysterious ghost inside of you.

No, I’m coming to you. And when I come to you, it’s energy. It’s like you’ve been like, energy. I can’t think of Anything else, You know, it’s like a full, rich meal in the form of bread and then. And the image of the wine is so beautiful. And that was always hidden for me because I was told sin would keep me from going to the Eucharist.

I was never told. I was never told that Eucharist forgives sins. You go to the Eucharist and you receive forgiveness. Does that mean that’s where you get rid of your mortal sins? No, that’s confession. No, but you go with your weaknesses and your brokenness and your longings for things to be different.

You wish you didn’t have that particular thing that gives you pleasure that you’ve embarrassed to death for anyone to know. You take all of that and you walk up there and you say, enter into that. And you know he’s going to say to you, thank you. Because so few people. Let me come into them. Into them means into them, uniquely them, which is their humanity, which is broken and twisted in many ways.

And yet somehow, if God comes into a person who has a certain bent, be it a weakness or a strength, he uses that weakness, and he uses that strength as a vehicle through which he can communicate to the people around. We were created in a unique way so that we would be unique vessels. When God enters into us, he doesn’t become this automatic. I mean, we don’t become like robots acting as if God. No, we are infused with him so that the effectiveness of who we are is so potent, and that effectiveness has an effect on other people, and that’s what changes them. And Eucharist infuses that personality that.

I don’t like call it personality. I like it more humanity, our unique humanity. Because personality is often something we add on to who we really are. Like Jung’s Persona. It’s like what you put on, but this is your. You really being you infused with God, who is the only creative force in the world that can heal and change hearts.

And he uses your humanity to be an instrument of reaching those unique people in your circle. I love when the Eucharist is celebrating that gospel passage. It’s like we all have this gift to give to each other, this bread and this fish, this nourishment and the Christ figure in the fish. We carry that to each other. In that story, everybody’s divided up and you get this feeling they must have put some down and everybody passed it around. It was all flowing between people, not from one source to everyone, but somehow in little groups.

And that’s the church, the way life is. It’s our circle of friends and all this stuff in it. And if we let divinity into every part of us, even the most unattractive parts of it, those unattractive parts, if we share them with other people, could be transforming just because we’re honest enough to share them. That’s what I mean. It’s infused divinity in our unique, broken humanity. The two are not opposite.

That’s what I’m afraid I was taught. Our humanity, our brokenness, is sort of incompatible with holiness. No, it’s just the opposite. They’re made for each other. So we have to believe in that, have faith in that. That’s the mystery.

Otherwise, it’s sort of like medicine. I don’t know. It’s going to change me. It’s going to make me better. I don’t go to the Eucharist to become holy in the sense of sinless. No, I go there because I want to embrace my sinless.

I want to embrace my brokenness. And that’s that will. That’s that’s the thing to be thankful for. Thank you God for enabling me to love me as yous love me. Amen. Closing Prayer Father, what a perfect name we have given to the gift you have given us, the gift of yourself coming into us just as we are.

Eucharist Thankfulness. We thank you for this great gift and we pray that you would enable us to be Eucharist to each other, that we would have the disposition that you have toward us. And we know that we’re enhanced and empowered to be you. If you are dwelling in us. Let us not make this about words, but about a reality, but something we can feel and sense and live. And we ask this in Jesus.

The music in our program was composed and produced by Ryan Harner for this show. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher, a listener supported program is archived and available on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com and available anytime, any, anywhere and for free on our podcast Finding God in Our Hearts. You can search and subscribe to Finding God in Our Hearts anywhere you download your podcasts. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is funded with kind donations by listeners just like you. You can make a one time or recurring tax deductible donation on our website pastoralreflectionsinstitute.com we thank you for your listenership and your continued without it, this program would not be possible. Pastoral Reflections with Monsignor Don Fisher is a production of the Pastoral Reflections Institute, a non profit in Dallas, Texas dedicated to enriching your spiritual journey.

Executive Producer Monsignor Don Fisher. Produced by Kyle Cross and recorded in Pastoral Reflections Institute Studios. Copyright 2024.