The Church believes that we, as individuals, can change. When many people in our age question the need to go to Mass on Sunday, the Church holds that all sacraments, but most importantly the Eucharist, can and do change our lives. Augustine’s Confessions recounts God’s response to his prayers, saying “’I [God] am the food [the Eucharist] of the fully grown; grow and you will feed on Me. And you will not change Me into you like the food your flesh eats, but you will be changed into Me.” This belief in the power of the Eucharist continues into our own time. Thomas Merton, the great twentieth-century Catholic mystic, said in his book The Living Bread that “the grace of the Eucharist is not confined to the moments of thanksgiving after Mass and communion, but reaches out into our whole day and into all the affairs of our life, in order to sanctify and transform them in Christ.” The Eucharist is not hocus pocus, and change does not happen overnight. But the Church believes at her core that the sacramental life, over time, leads us towards holiness.
Posted on: Sat, 13 Sep 2014 01:29:20 +0000
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