LIVING MONSTRANCE

See the video

>You can find the subtitles in your language next to the YouTube player controls.

Read

LIVING MONSTRANCE

My name is Paweł, this is my wife Joasia. We live in Wrocław, in a redemptorist parish, mature in years and young in marriage.

– The experiences of our life, often quite difficult, make us believe and even convince us, that we have the certainty, that if life is not built on God, sooner or later it will fall into ruins.

– At the moment we know that the only thing we can give God is our faithfulness; faithfulness understood as a decision to stay with him and abide by what we have decided.

– Regardless of our emotions, our predispositions…

– We were asked to say who or what the Eucharist is for us. In the past, the Eucharist was just one element of celebrating Sunday. Sunday was important because God appeared there at Holy Mass, at family prayer, and sometimes even at meditating of the Bible. On the other hand, His presence on the other days of the week was limited only to the daily prayer.

– So it was a time divided into what was sacred and profane, such a divergence and duality in which we lived.

– At the moment we are sure that we know how we want to live. So that God is present in our lives all the time, so that we can live with Him, be close to Him in all things – everyday things that we have to deal with every day.

– We are lucky and have the opportunity to organize our day in such a way that we pray together with the word of God, lectio divina, with contemplative prayer, that there may be the Eucharist in it. We also try to live the rest of the day so that all our duties, work, meetings, our meals, trips, meetings with friends… being aware of God’s presence. It is not that we depart from it – we depart from it very often, but it is our faithfulness, our decision that we want to return to it as often as possible, whenever we realize that we are somewhere else.

– Coming back to the question: “What is the Eucharist for us?”, we see mainly three dimensions of its meaning in our lives. The first is an attempt to respond to love, our love, to love – this prior love of God.

– The second is a source of grace. Believing that we are not able to give anything to God, apart from the faithfulness we mentioned earlier, that we know that we can receive from Him the grace He has to offer us, which is prepared and comes only from Him.

– This grace is independent of our feelings, dispositions, disease, and the state of our body. This grace is simply poured out on us during the Holy Mass.

– Another element is the fact that the Eucharist is for us the school of the Master, the school of our Lord who shows how great and how true love can be; what is the proper way of humility, how he humbles himself, offering himself to us in the Eucharistic form, in the form of a wafer, so fragile that “one thought may obscure him” – as the words of the song say.

– For us, the Eucharistic liturgy is also, above all, a life of prayer – a living prayer. What we do at home, what we do during some meetings or services, is the same as what we experience during Holy Mass. God is in me, and I am trying, I am trying to experience Holy Mass in a contemplative dimension, constantly looking for the presence of God. The same Lord God is present in my heart, the same Lord God is present in the wafer, the same Lord God is present in all that the priest does on the altar.

– It is so, that individual fragments, words, sentences of the Eucharist, prayers that are said there, speak to us differently at different stages of our lives. We hear it differently every day. Sometimes they are a source of strength for us, sometimes they open up a new dimension of meeting, they bring relief. It sometimes happens that with one sentence, which is said, for example, at the beginning of the Mass, in the introductory rites, when it says: “The love of God the Father, the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ and the gift of unity in the Holy Spirit be with you all” – when we are concerned about the unity of our Church, about everything that happens in it – these are words that bring relief and peace.

– During one of the Masses, I rediscovered the words: “Through Christ, with Christ and in Christ, you, God the Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory”, as a discovery of completely new dimensions of experiencing the Church – the Church here and now, the Church in the future. A Church that we will live in unity and then in eternity.

– We want to live in such a way that after receiving Holy Communion, what we believe and what we also want to believe is that we are a monstrance that brings Christ into the world; we are invited to be divinized by His grace and by this Christ in the world. Regardless of this, not only at the time when His presence is physically in us, but all the time, because we are inhabited by God, made in His image and likeness, and the Trinity lives in us, or at least from the moment of baptism – we abide in Him, He abides in us.

– The Holy Mass ends with the priest’s blessing, while we try to live on in such a way that we are at this moment a monstrance that goes into this world, knowing that God is in me, that God is in every human being I will meet. God is present and something tells me that He is present in every event that I have to deal with every day.

This post is also available in: polski (Polish) Español (Spanish)