We participate at Holy Mass as real people. Sometimes, we treat it as though we are about to put a beautiful dress on, but even though it is right to prepare to receive Christ with a respectable disposition, we are invited to come as we are interiorly, bringing our concerns before Him so that we can allow Him to be God in our hearts. We come to worship Him. In a Praise and Worship Symposium I attended in Singapore many years ago, my fellow delegates and I were told that worship connotes: 1) that God is pure Good and Love 2) that we are nothing without Him 3) that we need Him. This perspective makes us remember that God is our air and water. Life without Him is meaningless. It is essential that we as creatures of the Creator, establish a loving relationship with our very Source of existence.
In the Penitential Rite, we humbly acknowledge the blocks to our union with Him and ask for forgiveness. In the Readings, we strive to listen deeply to how His Wisdom guides us in our daily challenges. In the Homily, as He uses the priest to speak to us, we find integration between His Word and how we can concretely practice it.
I remember a healing priest suggesting that as the Bread and the Wine are being consecrated, we also ask the Lord to heal our family tree and to cleanse our bloodline from sins.
As we are about to receive His Body and Blood during Communion and earnestly ask Him to fill the void in our lives and to mend our brokenness from within, we pray, “Lord, I am not worthy that You should enter under my roof, but only say the Word and my soul shall be healed.”
In one of the Masses I participated in, after I received the Host, I heard the Lord telling me in my heart that He would quench my loneliness with His joy.
In the Eucharist, the Bread is taken, blessed, broken and shared. We too are taken by being personally called by name, blessed with a purpose and mission in life, and on our journey, we experience brokenness which we ask the Lord to heal. As we surrender this brokenness to Him, we also become wounded healers as we share the power of His love to others.
In the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, we all come to Christ’s table with our hunger for love. He feeds us spiritually, sacramentally and through His sacrificial, redemptive and merciful love. Every Mass is a healing Mass. May we come to this celebration with an open heart, believing that Christ our Healer, is truly present with the total gift of Himself.
