Blue Eyed Ennis: Feast of Corpus Christi 2013 and Global Hour of Prayer With The Pope

Feast of Corpus Christi 2013 and Global Hour of Prayer With The Pope

On Sunday June 2, 2013 at 5 pm Rome time, Pope Francis will preside at a special hour of Eucharistic adoration in St Peter's Square in Rome on the afternoon of the Feast of Corpus Christi.

The feast of Corpus Christi celebrates the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist.

But this year the Pope has added a special theme to this day : “One Lord, One Faith”, to testify to the deep unity that characterizes it.

“It will be an event, occurring for the first time in the history of the Church, which is why we can describe it as ‘historical’, says Arcbishop Fisichella, President of the Pontifical Council for Promoting the New Evangelization.

The cathedrals of the world will be synchronized with Rome and will, for an hour, be in communion with the Pope in Eucharistic adoration.

The Archbishop says there has been an incredible response to this initiative, going beyond the cathedrals and involving episcopal conferences, parishes, lay associations, and religious congregations, especially cloistered ones.”

Because the Year of Faith is meant “to intensify the celebration of the faith in the liturgy, especially in the Eucharist, which is the summit towards which the activity of the Church is directed and also the source from which all its power flows” the Pope has asked that this initiative be extended to as many parishes as possible throughout the world.

Pope Francis has two intentions for this one hour which are:

“For the Church spread throughout the world and united today in the adoration of the Most Holy Eucharist as a sign of unity.

May the Lord make her ever more obedient to hearing His Word in order to stand before the world ‘ever more beautiful, without stain or blemish, but holy and blameless.’

That through her faithful announcement, the Word that saves may still resonate as the bearer of mercy and may increase love to give full meaning to pain and suffering, giving back joy and serenity.”

Pope Francis’ second intention is:

“For those around the world who still suffer slavery and who are victims of war, human trafficking, drug running, and slave labour.

For the children and women who are suffering from every type of violence. May their silent scream for help be heard by a vigilant Church so that, gazing upon the crucified Christ, she may not forget the many brothers and sisters who are left at the mercy of violence.

For all those who find themselves in economically precarious situations, above all for the unemployed, the elderly, migrants, the homeless, prisoners, and those who experience marginalization.

That the Church’s prayer and its active nearness give them comfort and assistance in hope and strength and courage in defending human dignity.”

Further information can be found on the Year of Faith website, at www.annusfidei.va.

Click here for the programme in English for the Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament which Pope Francis will follow during the hour of Eucharistic prayer

Click here for some words on The Eucharist from Pope Francis written when he was Cardinal Bergoglio.

Read the Complete Document here: "Eucharist: Gift of God For The Life Of The World."

I find the painting below by Daniel Bonnell called The Dove and the Eucharist a very compelling one. When we receive the Eucharist we remember the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross and Jesus gives us His Holy Spirit to continue living this sacrificial life out in our everyday lives.

Image source.

Click here for my post "Prodigal's and God's Embrace" from Lent this year with more art from Daniel Bonnell and reflections on the Eucharist.

Image source

"The Eucharist is the "source and the summit of the Christian life." "The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it.

English: Damiane. The Eucharist (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself, our Pasch."
(Taken from Sacrosanctum Concilium 47, The Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy from the Second Vatican Council)

From Fr. John Dear S.J.

"For me, as a Christian, Catholic, and Jesuit priest, the Eucharist is the place where I remember and meet Jesus, the place of peace and reconciliation, and the place that pushes me back into the world to make peace."
You can read the rest of his article here.

We Come To Your Feast Hymn - by Michael Joncas.
Click on link below to listen.

We Come To Your Feast

We Come to Your Feast

Poems On Corpus Christi

A 15th century allegorical poem on Corpus Christi from here.

Malcolm Guite has a trio of sonnets for Corpus Christi feast here.

Evelyn Underhill' s poem .

William Wild Bill Taylor has a strong "protest poem" on Corpus Christi here.

with an accompanying and interesting critique of the poem.

Image source

Torture is the imagination of the state.

Eucharist is the imagination of the church.

Thanks to http://twitter.com/lensweet

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Lyrics from
She Must and Shall Go Free by Derek Webb

Go in peace to love and to serve
And let your ears ring long with what you've heard
And may the bread on your tongue leave a trail of crumbs
To lead the hungry back to the place that you are from

And take to the world this love, this hope and faith
And take to the world this rare, relentless grace
And like the three in one, know you must become
What you wanna save 'cause that's still the way
He takes to the world

So go and go far, take light deep in the dark
Believe what's true He uses all, even you
And may the bread on your tongue leave a trail of crumbs
To lead the hungry back to the place that you are from

Well, and take to the world this love, this hope and faith
And take to the world this rare, relentless grace
And like the three in one, know you must become
What you wanna save 'cause that's still the way
And He takes to the world

Well, and take to the world this love, this hope and faith
And take to the world this rare, relentless grace
And like the three in one, know you must become
What you wanna save 'cause that's still the way
He takes to the world, He takes to the world.

Reflections from 2010 Corpus Christi post here

Reflections 2011: The Bread of Life

Reflections for the Sunday feast from 2011 here

Related post here from Holy Thursday 2013 Reflections on The Last Supper.

"The beauty of the Eucharist is precisely that it is the place where a vulnerable God invites vulnerable people to come together in a peaceful meal.

When we break bread and give it to each other,

fear vanishes and God becomes very close."

Henri Nouwen, Bread for the Journey

"The Eucharist is a prayer of helplessness, a prayer for God to give us a unity we cannot give to ourselves.

It is not incidental that Jesus instituted it in the hour of his most intense loneliness, when he realized that all the words he had spoken hadn't been enough and that he had no more words to give.

When he felt most helpless, he gave us the prayer of helplessness, the Eucharist.

Our generation, like every generation before it, senses its helplessness and intuits its need for a messiah from beyond."

Kenosis; the ultimate self-emptying love of Christ

We cannot heal ourselves and we cannot find the key to overcome our wounds and divisions all on our own.

So we must turn our helplessness into a Eucharistic prayer, that asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, create community, and we must go to the Eucharist for this same reason."

(Extract from Ronald Rolheiser : Column Archive: the Healing Embrace of The Eucharist.)

Image source

"The Many Faces of The Eucharist." Click here for another article by Fr. Ron Rolheiser

and his video below on The Eucharist - God's Embrace

"To live, we must daily break the body and shed the blood of Creation.

When we do this knowingly, lovingly, skillfully, reverently, it is a
sacrament.

When we do it ignorantly, greedily, clumsily, destructively, it is a
desecration.
In such desecration we condemn ourselves to spiritual and moral loneliness, and others to want."

Wendell Berry (The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays of Wendell Berry)

Thought provoking article on Desire and The Eucharist here

Pange Lingua - Written by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, this hymn is considered the most beautiful of Aquinas' hymns
and one of the great hymns of the Church.The rhythm of the Pange Lingua is said to have come down from a marching song of Caesar's Legions: "Ecce, Caesar nunc triumphat qui subegit Gallias." The last two stanzas make up the Tantum Ergo (Down in Adoration Falling) that is used at Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

Image source

More previous posts and reflections on the Eucharist from the archives..

from Maundy Thursday 2010 here.

from Maundy Thursday 2011 here.

Feast of Corpus Christi 2010.

Image source by John Kiefer

"Can you drink this cup that I must drink ?"

Reflection by Sean M. Powers S.J.: "It Causes Me To Tremble"

This is a beautiful video honouring the Priesthood of Jesus Christ for Holy Thursday, featuring Washing of the Feet and The Words of the Eucharist.( pre- revised version.)

The music is an arrangement of an old hymn "Softly and Tenderly,"

Last Supper by Watanabe Sadao (1913-1996).

Listening To Christ's Heartbeat: A Eucharistic Image by Fr. Ron Rolheiser

Extract below...

"The last supper account in John's gospel gives us a wonderful mystical image.
The evangelist describes the beloved disciple as reclining on the breast of Jesus. What's contained in this image? A number of things.".....

Click here to read more.

Related articles below

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More from Seamus Heaney

“History says, Don't hope
On this side of the grave,
But then, once in a lifetime,
The longest-for tidal wave of justice can rise up
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea change
On the far side of revenge
Believe in miracles....”

“The aim of poetry and the poet is finally to be of service, to ply the effort of the individual into the larger work of the community as a whole.” ―

“I can't think of a case where poems changed the world, but what they do is they change people's understanding of what's going on in the world.”

and five more......

On his inspiration: 'The completely solitary self: that's where poetry comes from, and it gets isolated by crisis”

On which animal he'd prefer to be: "I might enjoy being an albatross, being able to glide for days and daydream for hundreds of miles along the thermals. And then being able to hang like an affliction round some people's necks."

On fame: "The gift of writing is to be self-forgetful, to get a surge of inner life or inner supply or unexpected sense of empowerment, to be afloat, to be out of yourself. The prizes can’t help you at all.”

On becoming a poet: "My quest for precision and definition, while it may lead backward, is conducted in the living speech of a landscape and a language that I was born with. If you like, I began as a poet when my roots were crossed with my reading."

On authority "At home in Ireland, there's a habit of avoidance, an ironical attitude towards the authority figure. "

Easter Hope All Year Round

Celestial spirit that doth roll
The heart's sepulchral stone away,
Be this our resurrection day,
The singing Easter of the soul -
O gentle Master of the Wise,
Teach us to say: "I will arise." ~
Richard Le Gallienne

"The great gift of Easter is hope - Christian hope which makes us have that confidence in God, in his ultimate triumph, and in his goodness and love, which nothing can shake."
-- Basil C. Hume

Celtic Christianity may offer us a lifeline in the form of an approach to faith which is rooted in the imagination...[Celts] excelled at expressing their faith in symbols, metaphors and images, both visual and poetic.
They had the ability to invest the ordinary and commonplace with sacramental significance, to find glimpses of God’s glory throughout creation and to paint pictures in words, signs and music that acted as icons opening windows on heaven and pathways to eternity
Ian Bradley The Celtic Way

Favourite Quotes from Pope Francis

“Thanks to magnanimity, we can always look at the horizon from the position where we are. That means being able to do the little things of every day with a big heart open to God and to others. That means being able to appreciate the small things inside large horizons, those of the kingdom of God.

This offers parameters to assume a correct position for discernment, in order to hear the things of God from God’s ‘point of view.’ … However the risk in seeking and finding God in all things, then, is the willingness to explain too much, to say with human certainty and arrogance: ‘God is here.’ We will find only a god that fits our measure. The correct attitude is that of St. Augustine: seek God to find him, and find God to keep searching for God forever.”

-- Pope Francis

Carlo Caretto's Love Letter to His Church

How much I much criticise you my church and yet how much I love you !

You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe you more than I owe anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence.

You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in the world have I seen anything more obscurantist, more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful.

Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your arms!

No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you.
Then too – where should I go? To build another church?

But I cannot build another church without the same defects, for they are my own defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough. I know better!"

Did the Woman Say ?

Great Quotes

A blank piece of paper is God's way of telling us how hard it is to be God.

Sidney Sheldon

There are things you can’t reach. But
you can reach out to them, and all day long.
The wind, the bird flying away. The idea of God.
And it can keep you as busy as anything else, and happier.

Mary Oliver

“A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.”

– Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

"There is an Indian proverb or axiom that says that everyone is a house with four rooms, a physical, a mental, an emotional, and a spiritual. Most of us tend to live in one room most of the time but, unless we go into every room every day, even if only to keep it aired, we are not a complete person."

~Rumer Godden, A House with Four Rooms, 1989

“And

"
"You can get all A's and still flunk life."

"Lost in the mystery of finding myself alive."

Walker Percy

"The day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom”

A tough life needs a tough language-and that's what poetry is. That's what literature offers- a language powerful enough to say how it is. It isn't a hiding place. It is a finding place.
Jeanette Winterson

There are two kinds of people: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “All right, then, have it your way.”

- C.S. Lewis

The independent hearts of Celtic descendents everywhere still yearn for the solitary place, still rejoice in the goodness of creation, still see the Lord beside them as they walk, still see Him in the face of friend and stranger. The gospel light with its eastern fire still gleams. The truth still lingers in the heart.
Pat Robson – The Celtic Heart

People are itchy and lost and bored and quick to jump at any fix. Why is there such a vast self-help industry in this country? Why do all these selves need help?

They have been deprived of something by our psychological culture. They have been deprived of the sense that there is something else in life, some purpose that has come with them into the world."

-- James Hillman

Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to the government only when it deserves it.
--Mark Twain

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.
--George Orwell

We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice: - we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.

― Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.
-- George Orwell

Never for the sake of peace and quiet deny your own experience or convictions.
--Dag Hammarskjöld

If you want to build a ship don't herd people together to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea.
— Antoine de Saint-Exupery

For what are we, without hope in our hearts, that someday we'll drink from God's blessed waters?"
-Bruce Springsteen

"Sometimes grace works like waterwings when you feel you are sinking."
-Anne Lamott

"A prayer may be a wordless inner longing, a sudden outpouring of love, a yearning within the soul to be for a moment united within the infinite and the good, a humbleness that needs no abasement or speech to express it, a cry in the darkness for help when all seems lost, a song, a poem, a kind deed, a reaching for beauty, or the strong, quiet inner reaffirmation of faith. A prayer in fact can be anything that is created by God that turns to God."

Paul Gallico

"God does not die when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illuminated by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason."

Dag Hammarskjold

When asked if I am pessimistic or optimistic about the future, my answer is always the same: If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse. What I see everywhere in the world are ordinary people willing to confront despair, power, and incalculable odds in order to restore some semblance of grace, justice, and beauty to this world.”

― Paul Hawken

The greatest religious challenge of our age is to hold together social action and spiritual disciplines. This is not just a theological necessity, dictated by the need to integrate all of life around the reality of the living God. It is a matter of sheer survival. The evils we confront are so massive, so inhuman, so impervious to appeals and dead to compassion, that those who struggle against them face the real possibility of being overwhelmed by them.”

~ Theologian Walter Wink

One day you will ask me which is more important? My life or yours?
I will say mine and you will walk away not knowing that you are my life.

~ Khalil Gibran

Blue Eyed Ennis

Feast of Corpus Christi 2013 and Global Hour of Prayer With The Pope

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