Advent Preparations – Attend Holy Mass Regularly
As we journey through this season of advent, I would like to encourage you to read the Bible regularly, and whenever you attend Holy Mass and the readings are read, put a plug on any word or a phrase from scripture that jumps out at you. As you do so, pray about it throughout the day and listen to what God is saying to you. This is a fantastic habit to develop, not just in advent, but throughout your life. This is very important for our Christian journey. Now to our topic for today.
As we go through the acronym we’ve created for Advent, I want us to keep in mind a central theme, “Are you ready? Be prepared.” If you were to find out that your time here on earth will end tomorrow, would you be ready? Are you prepared? What would it take for you to be ready? What do you need to put in place, or what aspect of your life would you have to change to be ready? This is what Advent challenges us to be mindful of.
So today we will take a look at the Holy Eucharist as one of the preparations for Advent that will help you get ready. Hopefully you would have remembered the acronym that we have created for Advent. here is a quick reminder:-
A – Attend Holy Mass
D – Devotion to prayer
V – Vocation
E – Encounter Christ in others
N – Now! Not later!
T – Turn away from sin
So A stands for Attend holy Mass. In fact I would like to say not just to attend holy Mass, but to attend holy Mass regularly and be fully present. What do I mean by this? For many, attending Mass means going to church on Christmas Eve, maybe New Years Eve, maybe Easter. That’s it. Many of us also attend Mass but we are somewhere else. What I mean is that we are physically present in the church but mentally, emotionally and spiritually absent. This will not give a good experience of this most precious and priceless gift. We must make every effort to be physically, mentally, and emotionally present when we attend holy Mass.
The holy Eucharist and why we should attend holy Mass is a huge topic to cover. Many scholars have written large volumes on this. Don’t worry. I will not be writing a large volume. I will try to avoid as much technical jargon as possible. I will also try to keep it as simple as possible. The best way for me to do this is to share from my own personal experience.
I am what is referred to as a cradle Catholic. I was born in the era when you believed in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, and that babies were dropped either by a crane flying over head, or came from a cabbage patch. That says a lot. The human imagination sad to say, in our modern day era has been severely eroded. Eroded to the point that unless I can see it and touch it I will not believe it.
I attended holy Mass every weekend because that is what we were taught to do. Most of it I did not understand and there were times when I would rather have been somewhere else. But nonetheless, out of obedience to my parents I went. I must say here that I am so very grateful to my parents for insisting that we went to holy Mass. The reality of life is that if we try to understand things before we do them, then there are many beneficial things that we will never do and will never experience. A classic example of this is love. If we tried to understand love before excepting love and ourselves being loved, then we will never be open to it because love hurts, and it does not make sense. This Is what the holy Mass is all about. It is about God who loves us so very much that he laid it all on the line for us so that we can have eternal life and live with him.
As mentioned earlier, I did not always understand what the holy Mass was all about, but I went anyway. I knew it was important for me to do. I knew it was an expression of God‘s amazing love for me. I didn’t quite understand how, but I accepted it and went anyway. Apart from my parents who insisted that I attended Mass every weekend, I am also very, very grateful to some priests who made quite an impact on my life and on my faith in Christ Jesus. They did an incredible job at explaining a number of things about the faith that helped me grow in faith and in confidence in the holy Roman Catholic church.
So in a sense, I must admit, there was a bit of a disconnect between what I perceived to have been happening on the altar each time I went to Mass, and what the Church teaches. The Church teaches that Jesus Christ is present – body, blood, soul, and divinity in the holy Eucharist. I knew that the Eucharist was to be revered, and I knew in my mind that Jesus was present in the holy Eucharist. However I never really put the two of them together. To that point, that knowledge never made it to my heart. It was all head knowledge.
One weekend I attended a Youth 2000 retreat. I was still a youth then – LOL. At that retreat, a priest would walk around the congregation with the Blessed Sacrament – which is the holy Eucharist. As he did that, I saw people falling, I saw people crying, and a whole host of other things. One incident that was a game changer for me at that retreat was a man who was in the schoolyard. As the priest got closer to him, I noticed that he started acting up and making all sorts of strange chants. Eventually when the priest was about 10 feet or so from him, he took off as if he was in a sprint. Not even Usain Bolt would have caught up with him. When this happened, immediately the scripture passage with Jesus passing through Gerasene where there was a demoniac, and when he saw and recognized Jesus from a distance, he exclaimed, “have you come here to torture us!?” (Ref. Mark 5: 1 – 20 and Luke 8: 26 – 39) It was then that I realized that what the priest was holding was not just communion but it was the real presence of Jesus Christ. That was actually Jesus walking through the crowd. And the lights went on for me.
It was from then on that my experience of the Eucharist changed. Not only that I attend Holy Mass, but I did so with the increased understanding that Jesus was truly present. Wherever Jesus is present, an abundance of blessings and graces flow. I therefore always wanted to be in his presence.
All of us are on a pilgrimage through this life – hopefully to Eternal life in Christ. God’s desire is that every single soul will be saved and come to the full knowledge of God (1 Timothy 2:4). Just as athletes preparing to run in a particular race have to prepare their physical bodies for the race, so to we on our pilgrimage from our earthly life towards eternal life, must prepare our souls. When we receive Jesus in the holy Eucharist, that is amazing grace for our souls. The Eucharist is where I get the grace and the strength to do things that I normally would not be able to do. The Eucharist is where I get the grace and the strength to forgive those who have hurt me really bad. The Eucharist is where I get the grace and the strength to strive towards the holiness that God is calling all of us to. The Eucharist is where I get the grace and the strength to be hopeful, even amidst major calamities and a general sense of hopelessness all around. It is through Christ in the holy Eucharist that I get that grace. And it is through Christ in the holy Eucharist that you too can get the grace to be all that God is calling you to be. The Eucharist is therefore an incredible free gift towards preparing for the coming of Christ. It is one of the best practices during Advent and throughout our lives to always be prepared since we do not know the time nor the day of the second coming of Christ.
Just before the long discourse that Jesus gave in John chapter 6 on the Eucharist, in verse 29 he said, “this is doing the work of the father, you must believe in the one he has sent.“ It was in the discourse that followed that Jesus said, “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I shall give you is my flesh, for the life of the world.“ After the Jews started arguing amongst themselves about how can this man give us his flesh to eat, Jesus did not change what he was saying to them. In fact he went deeper and said, “in all truth I tell you, if you do not eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood you have no life in you.” Jesus did not try to explain what he had said earlier. As we read on in John chapter 6 we see that many left Jesus that day saying that this language was intolerable! We can no longer walk with him. Then Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them, “What about you? Will you also leave?“ And Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the message of eternal life.“ (John 6: 66 – 68)
There are other instances in the Bible where Jesus after giving a teaching that other persons found difficult to understand, he would take his disciples aside and explain it to them. One example of this was the parable of the sower and the seeds. In this instance here in John chapter 6, Jesus did not take his disciples aside to explain further what he meant. So he therefore must have meant exactly what he said. Here is where the simple childlike faith that I alluded to earlier comes in. We try very often to understand everything. Our understanding is limited. God is infinite. We cannot fit something that is infinite into something that is extremely finite. No matter how brilliant we might be, we can never understand God. Saint Paul writes, “How rich and deep are the wisdom and knowledge of God! We cannot reach to the root of his decisions or his ways. Who has ever known the mind of the Lord? Who has ever been his advisor? Who has given anything to him, so that his presence come only as a debt returned? Everything there is, comes from him and is caused by him and exists for him. To him be glory forever! Amen (Romans 11: 33-36)
In reading through the Bible, it becomes very apparent that God loves us in a way that we can never begin to imagine nor understand. God is so much in love with us that he desires to be constantly with us – Emmanuel! God is with us. One of the ways, in fact one of the most powerful ways in which God comes close to us, and is available to us is through the holy Eucharist. Humanly speaking, that is as close as he could get if only we would open our hearts, recognize him, and accept him. When God is with us as Romans eight says, who can be against us? When we attend holy Eucharist regularly and receive Jesus regularly, and in a state of grace, we too can become like Mary and be filled with grace.
As we journey through this advent and beyond I want to encourage you to take full advantage of this free gift, this beautiful gift that has been given to us. As it is said in Proverbs 3:5, “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not to your own understanding.” Do not try to understand God. Just accept him and open your hearts to him. Ask him to increase your faith and to help you to see him in the holy Eucharist.
Finally, and as if to drive the point of advent home that we know not the time nor the date of Jesus’ second coming, I received news while preparing this post, that a very good friend of mine who had migrated to the US died suddenly yesterday. Without knowing it, he impacted my life through his music. I am absolutely sure he did not know that he was going to die when he did. But knowing him, I am sure he would have been ready. God rest his soul. So to my dear friends we do not know the time nor the hour. We must therefore always be ready. The Eucharist is an amazing free gift to help us along the road of readiness for the coming of Christ this Christmas, and all the other ways that he can come to us.
Father, as we continue through this life, we ask that you cause the scales from our eyes and our hearts to fall away, so that we may truly see Jesus your Son as he really is in the most Holy Eucharist. We ask this through the same Christ, our Lord. Amen!
References:
The Catechism of the Catholic Church
