He just kept saying to her in a most gentle voice, “Now, tell Daddy what’s wrong. Just try to tell me what’s wrong. It’s okay.”
This past summer I had the great privilege of attending the National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis, USA, joining five of my Madonna House brothers and sisters there as we represented our community.
Eucharistic Congresses are a feature in the life of the modern global Church and have occurred in many countries over the past century and a half. Their intent is to foster devotion to and faith in the mystery of the Eucharist, Christ’s living and real presence in his Church under the appearance of bread and wine.
This is the great sacrament of communion and life given to us from the Lord’s own hands at the Last Supper and passed on faithfully in the Church through the millennia.
I write this article realizing that many of our readers are not American and it was very much an American event, that even in the USA only a small percentage of the faithful were able to attend, and that for those who did attend, it is now a somewhat distant memory.
I don’t want to write a lengthy article about the Congress. I’d rather write about the reason for the Congress — the Eucharist itself, always a subject in season and an appropriate topic for the writer of a column entitled “Word Made Flesh.”
Where else is the Word of God enfleshed more perfectly than in the sacrament at the very heart of our Christian religion?
The essence of all I heard and saw this past July was a profound preaching on the mystery of the Eucharist. It was a constant call to see in the Eucharist not only a profound gift of God’s love, which it is, but in that gift to recognize an insistent challenge to go out to the world to proclaim the Gospel.
Christ gives us his Body and Blood; we are to give our lives in love for the world. Christ feeds us with the very life and strength of God; we have within us all the grace we need to proclaim, to evangelize, to cry the Gospel with our lives.
At the heart of every Mass is a deep call to conversion and to repentance (this is why we begin every Mass with the penitential rite).
The world desperately needs Christ and the Gospel. We have Christ and the Gospel in its fullness in the gift of the Eucharist. We simply must give our lives to him to carry him to every corner of the world!
To whatever extent we are not doing that in full, we need to repent and turn to the Lord anew, daily. That was the core message of the Eucharistic Congress.
That being said, the image that has remained in my mind and heart from my time in Indianapolis did not come from any talk, any liturgy, or anything at all that was part of the official program of the Congress. It came in a brief encounter — not even that, really, as I never met the man or exchanged a single word with him.
It was a father with his very small daughter. We just happened to be walking alongside each other going from point A to point B (these mega-events always involve a fair bit of walking!). His little girl, about three years old, had clearly had enough and was in a fretful, fussy state. He was carrying her in his arms and she was collapsed on his chest.
As she whimpered incoherently, he just kept saying to her in a most gentle voice, “Now, tell daddy what’s wrong. Just try to tell me what’s wrong. It’s OK.” And that was all. He went his way, I went mine.
Well, that’s the Eucharist, or at least that’s the image of the Eucharist I ended up carrying with me from the Congress.
It is good to contemplate the reality of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament and see therein the fire of love calling us to become fire, the food for all humanity calling us to be food and drink for the hungry, the blood poured out in infinite charity calling us to be poured out likewise. All of that contemplation is very true, very good, very necessary.
But if we’re not careful, it can also sound something like this: Do better! Try harder! You’re not good enough! Stop being so mediocre! What’s wrong with you?
We have to know that the same Lord who calls us to truly become saints of God, practicing heroic virtue and maybe even dying for his sake — this same Lord knows well that we are also that poor little child who comes to him so often bruised and broken, frightened and overwhelmed, maybe sometimes just plumb tired, and unable even to say with any clarity what’s wrong.
The Eucharistic Lord Jesus does indeed enfold us in his tender mantle of love. He holds us close to his kind and gentle heart, that he may console, comfort, and carry us.
And only if we come to him as the poor men and women we really are, not all that different from that little fussy child, can we be encouraged — that is, have his courage breathed into us, his strength filling our weakness, his love becoming our love.
It is only by living in our poverty, carried by the Lord in his immensity, that we can become, in our turn and according to his perfect will, his eucharistic body given, his blood poured out, and so make God’s love visible in this world which needs it so badly.
The Good Shepherd icon detail, by ©Helen Hodson, Madonna House
