Challenges to religious and spiritual awareness during times of uncertainty

Beautifully written homily: Challenges to worship during the coronavirus pandemic.  

Let's write! A tribute to the  Sacraments, our faith and spirtuality. Thank you to Father Brian Ching, CSC, Director, Old College Undergraduate Seminary; Rector, of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart at Notre Dame University, in Indiana, for sending me his homily's transcript.  I am honored to share this thoughtful homily, delivered on the Feast of Corpus Christi.

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Basilica of the Sacred Heart- University of Notre Dame, Indiana
Rev. Brian Ching, CSC (Congregation of Holy Cross)
June 14, 2020

How Holy is this feast,

in which Christ is our food,

his passion is recalled,

grace fills our hearts,

and we receive the pledge of the glory to come.

This beautiful text found as the antiphon for the Canticle of Mary for the celebration of vespers on this feast, beautifully captures, in few words, the grace and love present every time we gather around the altar for Mass. Yet, at the same time, this year, there is a tinge of sadness in our celebration of this feast, since so many are separated from the Eucharist during the coronavirus pandemic. 

Although a few of us are able to gather here in the Notre Dame Basilica, I know that so many more are participating at home through CatholicTV and while many of you have written to express your gratitude for being able to join us for Mass, I know it is not the same and it should not be the same. The Mass is not designed for virtual worship, it is designed to gather a community of believers together in one place, to make present the body of Christ and I pray each day that the work of doctors and scientists may advance so that we might
soon return to our usual reality.

But my friends, even though is sad and difficult for us, who are used to being able to have such regular access to the sacraments, to be separated from them, we would be doing ourselves a disservice to believe that our inability to go to Mass as we would like, somehow limits God’s ability to be present to us and for us, and among us. 

Though we may not be able to receive Christ as our food, we are still able to recall His passion and he is still able to fill our hearts
with grace and grant us the pledge of the glory that is to come. 

Yes, though our hearts are filled with grace and joy in receiving the Eucharist, God’s grace and mercy is not bound by our ability to receive. For those of us who are used to going to Mass with relative ease, this pain at not being able to reminds us of the many Christians throughout the world for whom making Sunday Mass is not as easy. For many of our brothers and sisters in predominantly Muslim countries, Sunday is a workday and getting to Sunday Mass means getting there before or after a full days work.

Challenged to attend Mass....

Our parish in Monterey, Mexico, goes on a mission trip every Holy Week into remote villages in the Mexican jungle, and when they arrive it is the first time in months that those villagers have seen a priest and are able to have their confessions heard and receive the Euchrarist. The recent synod on the Amazon highlighted the plight of countless Amazonian Catholics who long for the Euchrarist, but are unable to do so due to the lack of priests. 

Challenged to celebrate Mass....

On July 5, 2013, jubilant Vietnamese Catholics celebrated the closing of the diocesan phase of Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan’s beatification process. Although he is not yet canonized, the Vietnamese faithful already consider him a saint and view him as an icon of the Vietnamese Church.

Cardinal Nguyen Van Thuan was Coadjutor Archbishop of Saigon for just 4 months before he was arrested by the North Vietnamese government and sent to a re-education camp for 13 years, 9 of which were spent in solitary confinement. He was reliant on people sending him small medicine bottles filled with wine and scraps of bread in the mail and sympathetic guards to smuggle them to him for even a chance at saying Mass on a cardboard box.

Yes, our relationship with the Eucharistic may look different these days, and our celebration of the Mass might have lost some of the luster we are used to, but God’s promise of eternal glory is still made to us and still motivates us into discipleship, into action, into being faithful witnesses of the Gospel. This is good news friends, it is good news because in these weeks God is calling us to renew our commitment to Him, to renew our witness to the Gospel, to
renew our pledge of discipleship. Perhaps even more tragic than our distance from the Sacraments, in these past few weeks we have come face to face again with the reality that the Body of Christ is broken. That the unity that this very sacrament draws us into is not being lived to its full potential.

Our political and ecclesial climate these days have been rife with
division, discord, and disunity. 

Our headway towards peace and justice, towards equity and dignity seems to have stalled in the mire of political grandstanding and self-interest. 

Simply put, it seems like our preference is to beat the other guy rather than work to achieve a common purpose and
common goal. 

The goal is simple, the goal is unity, the goal is to live together
as brothers and sisters in Christ, the goal is to live in a world where each person can live with the dignity of one made in the image and likeness of God.

Unfortunately the steps toward this goal are slightly more complex.
Systems of inequality, injustice, and prejudice built over centuries are not easily dismantled and it can be easy for us to stand before this behemoth of a task and pass the buck, to convince ourselves that we are so small and the task so large that it must be someone else’s problem, that it’s someone else’s fix.

But friends, here again, the Eucharist offers us a lesson, here where the King of Kings and the Lord of Lords come to us in food that is not refined or elegant, in food that is not complex or sophisticated, but in food that is plain and simple, in ordinary bread and ordinary wine. God chooses to come to us in these ordinary elements so that He might convey his extraordinary grace.

Similarly friends, God uses ordinary you and ordinary me to do the same. God uses us, his ordinary people, to convey his extraordinary grace. And so it starts with us, it starts with us taking a hard look at ourselves and examining our own assumptions, presumptions, and judgements.

It starts with us being willing to honestly ask ourselves if there are
times when we jump to conclusions or make assumptions because of the way someone talks, or someone speaks, because of the way someone dresses or acts, and yes to ask ourselves if we jump to conclusions or make assumptions because of the color of someone’s skin, or their sex, or their religious belief, or even the badge they wear. To ask ourselves why we might be more cautious
when one sort of person walks into a store and not another, why we might be more on edge when we see one type of person on an airplane and not another.

And once we have asked ourselves those questions, we come to the harder ones, are there times when we have been witness to injustice, inequality, and prejudice and turned the other way. When we have thought “that’s just the way it is” or “that’s someone else’s problem.” When our silence has allowed those evils to perpetuate themselves, over and over again. Yes it’s true that systemic problems require systemic solutions, but we won’t make any progress until we recognize that we are all, each on our own way, part of the
system, because we are all connected together by the dignity of the children of God.

That examination is not an easy one, it will make us uncomfortable, in fact maybe these past few moments have made us uncomfortable, but it is a necessarily recalling of Christ’s passion so that His grace might fill our hearts.

Friends, as we continue our celebration around this altar, both in person and virtually, may the grace that God gives to us here, sustain us in our lives of discipleship and may it give us the courage to speak the difficult truths of human dignity and equality so that we might become what we receive, 

One Body, united in Christ.
How Holy is this feast,
in which Christ is our food,
his passion is recalled,
grace fills our hearts,
and we receive the pledge of the glory to come.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N-3BO_PQbqY

Hymn: We are one body, One Body In Christ

We are one body, one body in Christ
And we do not stand alone
We are one body, one body in Christ
And he came that we might have life

I am the way, the truth, the life
I am the final sacrifice
I am the way, the truth, the life
Believe in me, have eternal Life

We are one body, one body in Christ
And we do not stand alone
We are one body, one body in Christ
And he came that we might have life

At the name of Jesus
Every knee shall bow
Jesus is the Lord
And he will come again
At the name of Jesus
Every knee shall bow
When you eat my body
You drink my blood
I will live in you
And you will live in my love

We are one body, one body in Christ
And we do not stand alone
We are one body, one body in Christ
And he came that we might have life

On the rock of Peter
On the church I built
Receive my spirit
Let my spirit with my gifts be filled
You are my body, and my hands and feet
My word of light to everyone you meet
I am the way, the truth, the life
I am the final sacrifice
I am the way, the truth, the life
Believe in me, have eternal Life

We are one body, one body in Christ
And we do not stand alone
We are one body, one body in Christ
And he came that we might have life

I am the way
The truth, the life
Believe in me
Eternal Life