Ave Maria Meditations
It would seem impossible, did we not know it to be true, that God could abide with us always, in littleness and humility even more extreme than infancy. Or that His love should choose to give us the unity of His birth, death, and Resurrection, always taking place at the heart of the world, from sunrise to sunset, and all life and all love always radiating from it.
Yet this is so. Every day, every hour, Christ is born on the altar in the hands of the priest; Christ is lifted up and sacrificed; Christ is buried in the tomb of the human heart; and Christ rises from the tomb to be the life of the world through His Communion with men.
This is the Host-life. Everything relates to the Host. If we live the Host-life in Christ, we shall bring to life the contemplation of the Passion of the infant Christ and live it in our own lives. The Host is the Bread of Life. It is the good seed that the Sower sowed in His field; it is the harvest ready for the reaping. It is the seed that is sown by the Spirit in every public way and every secret place on earth. It is the seed which, whenever it is buried, springs up from the grave, to flower with everlasting life.
It is the littleness, the dependence, the Divine Infant’s trust in human creatures. It is the silence of the Child in the womb, the constriction of the swaddling bands.
It is the Bread which is broken and yet is our wholeness, the wholeness of all that is. It is the breaking of the Bread which is the Communion of all men in Christ, in which the multiple lives of the world are one Christ-life, the fragmentary sorrows of the world are one Christ-Passion, the broken loves of the world are one Christ-love. The Host seems to be divided among us; but in reality we, who were divided, are made one in the Host. It is the obedience of childhood, the simplicity which is the singleness of childhood’s love. It is the newness in which Heaven and earth are made new. It is the birth of Christ in the nations, the restoring of the Christ-child to the world and of childhood to the children.
The Mass is the birth and death and Resurrection of Christ: in it is the complete surrender of those who love God. The miracle of Cana takes place. The water of humanity is mixed into the wine and is lost in it. The wine is changed into the blood of Christ. In the offering of the bread and wine we give material things, as our Lady gave her humanity, to be changed into Christ. At the words of consecration the bread and wine are not there any more; they simply are not any more but, instead, Christ is there. In that which looks and tastes and feels like unleavened bread, Christ comes closer to us even than the infant could come, even than the child in the womb. He is our food, our life.
We give ourselves up to Him. He gives Himself up to us. He is lifted up in the priest’s hands, sacrificed. God accepts the sacrifice and gives Christ back to us. He is lowered onto the altar; He who was taken down from the Cross is given to us in Communion, buried, laid to rest in our hearts.
It is His will to rise from the dead in our lives and to come back to the world in His risen Host-life.
In His risen life on earth Christ often made Himself recognized only by the characteristic of His unmistakable love, by showing His wounds, by His infinite courtesy, by the breaking of bread. He would not allow the sensible beauty and dearness of His human personality, His familiar appearance, to hide the essential Self that He had come back to give. Wholly consistent with this is Christ’s return to us in the Host. We know that in it He is wholly present: body, blood, soul, and divinity. But all this is hidden, even His human appearance is hidden. Because this is the way of absolute love, He insists on coming to us stripped of everything but Himself.
For this self giving Christ in the Host is poor, poorer than He was when, stripped of everything, He was naked the Cross. He has given up even the appearance of His body, the sound of His voice, His power of mobility. He divested Himself of color and weight and taste. He has Himself as close to nothing as He could be, while still be’ accessible to us. In the Host, He is the endless “Consummatum est” of Passion of the infant Christ. In the Host, He is our life on earth today.
It is almost frightening to seek an answer to the question “Why does God remain in our midst silent and passive, knowing and seeing everything, but saying and doing nothing, while cruelty, injustice, ignorance, and misery go on and on and on?”
It is a frightening question until we remember what it is which alone can restore humanity to happiness; that there is only one thing that can do it, namely supernatural life, beginning secretly in each individual heart, just as Incarnate Love began secretly on earth in the heart of Mary. There is only one thing: the birth of the infant Christ in us, Incarnate Love.
No voice of warning could effect this. That could make men tremble; but it could not make them love. No armed force could do it, not even supernatural force. That could make men slaves and love is always free.
Caryll Houselander
“O eternal Word! O my Savior! Thou art the divine eagle whom I love and who allurest me. Thou who, descending to this land of exile, didst will to suffer and to die, in order to bear away each single soul and plunge it into the very heart of the Blessed Trinity – Love’s eternal Home! Thou who, returning to Thy realm of light, dost still remain hidden here in our vale of tears under the appearance of the white Host, to nourish me with Thy own substance.
Forgive me, 0 Jesus, if I tell Thee that Thy love reacheth even unto folly, and at the sight of such folly what wilt Thou but that my own heart should leap up to Thee? How could there be any limit to my trust?
“I know well that for Thy sake the saints have made themselves foolish-being ‘eagles’ they have done great things. Too little for such mighty deeds, my folly lies in the hope that Thy love accepts me as a victim, and in my confidence that the angels and saints will help me to fly unto Thee with Thy own wings, 0 my divine Eagle! As long as Thou willest I shall remain with my gaze focused upon Thee, for I long to be fascinated by Thy divine eyes, I long to become Love’s prey”
+St. Therese of the Child Jesus
