Am i made for this?

Homily

Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

11 June 2023

St. Lawrence Catholic Campus Center at the University of Kansas

AMDG

Am I made for this?

Today is the day set aside by the Church to lift up the Eucharist and to present it as the sole hope of the world.  If you've ever been to a World Youth Day with millions of people gathered around the Eucharist, you get it.  Nothing is more unifying.  Nothing is more meaningful.  Nothing gives more life.  Nothing renews the hope of the world more than the Blessed Sacrament.

It's why Jesus said Do this in memory of me.

The problem is that none of us actually do it.  The problem is not that 70% of Catholics doubt the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. It's that 100% do.  It's hard to be all in. It's hard to trust completely.  It's hard to let the presence of God in the Blessed Sacrament to be everything it's meant to be.

So I must ask myself, am I made for this?

The longer I'm a priest, the longer I'm convinced that everyone is made for a daily holy hour.  Everyone and anyone who wants to be fully alive is meant to Do This in memory of me.  Today is the day the Church doubles down on her Eucharistic faith, and prays for help for her unbelief, for the Eucharist has been revealed as the source and summit of all life and every life.

Jesus makes his point abundantly clear.  Amen, amen I say to you.  Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life within you.  He really said that.  He really meant it.  Yet what else could He say?  If He is God, if He is the source of life, and if our relationship with Him is our life, what it means to be alive, then if that relationship is consummated and actualized in the Eucharist I must eat His flesh and drink His blood.  Jesus admits no exceptions.  I have no excuse, and nowhere else I could go, for He has the words of eternal life.

Jesus desires not just bios for you, but your zoe!  In the end, it's not just how long you live, it's how you live.  True life is measured vertically.  Jesus calls it eternal life, the life that never dies.  True life is measured by the depth of my love for God and my neighbor, and nothing else.

There is no greater love that to lay down one's life for one's friends - that is the sacrifice of the Eucharist in which we participate, through which we cooperate in the redemption of our souls and the fulfillment of our mission.  In the Eucharist alone is what it means to live.

Am I made for this?

So many people ask me what's my plan for keeping college students Catholic, for getting them back to Mass.  I don't care for the question, not do I find it meaningful.  

How do I show, by my life and my prayer, that I was made for this.  How I demonstrate that I can't live without the Eucharist, that I was made to engage the source of life each and every day?

It's the more important, and urgent question than keeping somebody else Catholic.

Ask yourself instead - am I made for this?  If so, what must change?

+mj