Corpus Christi

The story goes that when the Feast of Corpus Christi was established in 1264, by Pope Urban IV a competition was held for the music that was accompany the feast - that time of course, it was all Gregorian chant. Two great theologians St Bonaventure and St Thomas Aquinas got to work on the texts and the music. When the day came for the compositions to be heard by the Pope, St Thomas was the first to present. When he came to the end, there was silence in the room. St Bonaventure who was beside Thomas took the text he had prepared and placed it on the ground. He looked at Thomas and said, nothing could compare to the beauty and faith of what just been heard. Whether the story is true or not, it cannot be denied that the music associated with this feast is beautiful.

The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ is beautiful. When we pause and think about the mystery of what we celebrate, we can only do what the words of the Adoro Te says; we can only get lost in wonder. I think a problem we have in our words today is that we have lost the ability to get lost in wonder!
When we celebrate the Eucharist  we celebrate the unending presence of God in our midst. Not only that, in the celebration of the Sacred Mysteries we remember all that Christ has done for us.

There are two antiphons associated with evening prayer for the feast. The O Sacrum Convivium from second vespers:

O sacred banquet!
in which Christ is received,
the memory of his Passion is renewed,
the mind is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory to us is given.
Alleluia.

and a less celebrated one from first vespers:

Lord, how good you are and how gentle your spirit.
When you wished to show your goodness to your children
 you gave them bread from heaven filling the hungry with good things
and sending the rich away empty.

Both of these reveal a little of the great beauty of the Eucharist - the memory of the Passion is renewed, our minds are filled with grace and the pledge of future glory is given to us. We are reminded of how generous God is to us, giving us everything in Christ. On this feast day may we have a chance to experience the beauty of the mysteries we celebrate day after day and week after week. Stay with us Lord, for evening is approaching. We are also reminded of the gentleness and the kindness of God. "To ransom a slave you gave away your Son"

The Eucharist is in the heart of countless communities throughout the world. As we celebrate Corpus Christi we remember that Jesus is with us. We partake in His sacred passion. He stays with us to make us one with one another and with Him. The Eucharist is unity; the Eucharist is beauty: the Eucharist is love.

This a good reflection written the Mass by Gregory Dix in his work 'The Shape of the Eucharist'

"Men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph, for a bride and her groom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of a parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a school boy sitting an exam or Columbus setting out to discover America; in thankfulness that my father did not die of pneumonia; for the village headman tempted to return to fetish because the yam crop had failed; for captain so and so, wounded and a prisoner of war; while the hiss of scythes in the think June grass came faintly through the windows of the Church; tremulously, by the old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk; gorgeously for the canonisation of St Joan of Ark - one could fill many pages with the reasons why people have done this, and not yet tell a hundredth part of them. And best of all, week by week, and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive Sundays, faithfully, unfaithfully, across the parishes of Christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta dei - the holy common people of God.

Adoremus in aeternum Sanctissimum Sacramentum!




This is a childhood favorite of mine: