Catholic hangover solemnities

Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi
St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center
University of Kansas
6 June 2010
Year for Priests

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Easter has been over for two weeks now. Pentecost is in the rearview mirror. Yet we are still wearing white in today's liturgy. It's almost like we're pretending to still be in Easter. Today's feast of Corpus Christi is what I like to call an Easter hangover feast. I'm using hangover in the good sense, not in the headache sense. I'm using hangover in the sense that the celebration just has a hard time ending. It is too good to end so soon. 50 days is just not enough time to party, to celebrate the Easter mysteries, and the grace that flows from Jesus' resurrection from the dead. We see this in the Church all over! Even though the first communions, confirmations, and graduations are pretty much over, and summer has begun, ordinations to the priesthood and weddings continue to crowd the calendar alongside trips to the lake and Royals losses. Easter grace still flows out into the summer. We are still wearing white today in the Church, not the green of ordinary time.

The last two feasts before the Church begrudgingly dons the green of ordinary time are awkward and enigmatic in some ways, yet they can and should be made personally meaningful and relevant. Take the Solemnity of the Holy Trinity for starters, which we celebrated last Sunday. In one sense, it is a Solemnity the Church has to stick somewhere awkwardly, for it is the celebration not of who we are or how we relate to God, but who God is in Himself. In a way, in celebrating the deepest and central mystery of who God has revealed Himself to be, we are supposed to celebrate how different God is than us. Celebrating the Trinity can be thought to be the opposite of celebrating the Incarnation, when God became one of us. Celebrating the Trinity is celebrating the beauty of the divine nature which is so unlike our human nature, and a nature that does not need us at all, being perfect in itself. In a sense, celebrating the Trinity is celebrating the fact that God is completely happy without us. This is something that is perhaps not our responsibility to celebrate. Yet what a solemnity Trinity is and was, and how fruitful is our celebration of it, when we celebrate that God in his divine nature has revealed Himself to be a communion of persons. While it is impossible for us to grasp the conception of three in one, any of us who have loved deeply know that when you love, it becomes nearly impossible to tell where one life ends and another begins. For those of us who love, even death does not have the power to unravel the bonds that love creates. When we celebrate that God is a communion of persons, we celebrate that the more we learn about God, the more that we see Him in his essence as pure love, and in contemplating the mystery we gain perspective on why we are here, what our vocation is, and how love completes the mystery of the human person, made in the image and likeness of the Blessed Trinity.

What is more, those of us who are in communion with Jesus Christ are given a place within this great mystery of the Trinity. The Trinity is a home for us, if you will. It is a location where we reside. It is an identity that we have. So the more we learn about the Trinity, the more we know about who we are and where we live and move and have our being. Being in communion with Jesus places is in that same relationship with the Father and the Holy Spirit that He has. It is only our ignorance of who we are and where we stand that makes it possible for us to be anything other than holy. Living in and with the Holy Trinity is a definition of holiness. That is why we contemplate the mystery of the Trinity, for knowing who we are and where we stand makes it easy for us to know what to do, which is what most of us are worried about anyway. Not knowing how we should live is always less a crisis of morality and more a crisis of spirituality, of not knowing that being in communion with Jesus puts us in the Father's heart and in the life of the Holy Spirit.

Well, enough about the Holy Trinity. That was just a way of saying how important today's solemnity of Corpus Christi is, for it is this central sacrament of our faith that delivers access to the deepest mystery of our faith, the mystery of the Trinity. We only enter into the life of the Trinity, which does not need us and is full without us, and is completely unlike us, by being in communion with Jesus, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity, that we might share in His divinity. It is here, in this sacrament of sacraments, that Jesus is fully present to us, and through an unbelievable condesencion, he allows us to feed on Him, so that we might be united with him both in body and in spirit. Jesus knew the weakness of our faith, that many of us would not have the humility to go see him in Bethlehem, nor the courage to follow Him to Calvary, but so much does He want us to be where He is, that whenever we refuse to go where He is, He humbles Himself even more and makes Himself fully present body, blood, soul and divinity, in the sacrament of the Eucharist. There is nowhere that Christ will not make Himself present in order to rescue those of us He loves. He even allows His nature to be confected by sinful men whom He has chosen, and He even allows His divine nature in all its majesty and glory, and His human nature received from the yes of a perfect woman, to be joined and made present in a species so easy for us to abuse and to ignore, the species of bread and wine. Even with the knowledge that it would be so easy for us to receive Him casually and in vain, He still does not withhold Himself, but gives Himself perfectly in each and every Eucharist, even here once again this morning in Lawrence, Kansas. So much does He want to be faithful to His Father's will that He not lose one of those He has been given, He allows each one of us unworthy sinners to take him under the roof of our bodies, that perhaps we would realize that with Him, we are also in the heart of the Father and in the life of the Holy Spirit.

How thankful am I for these Easter hangover feasts, for without them, the party would end too soon. Without them, could we hope to go into ordinary time thankful and aware of who we are and what we receive? May these beautiful solemnities give us a spiritual life and a identity as children loved by God that no circumstances of our lives can take away from us. Amen.