There is a special benefit which Christ, in the Holy Church, has left
to all the good: namely, that supper of the great feast of Passover,
which He instituted when the time had come for Him to leave His sorrow
and go to the Father, after He had eaten of the paschal lamb with His
disciples and the ancient law had been fulfilled. At the end of the
meal and of the feast, He wished to give them a special food, which
He had long desired to give. In this way He would make an end of the
ancient law and bring in the new, and so He took bread in His sacred
hands and consecrated His sacred body and afterwards His blood, and
gave them to all His disciples, and left them as a common gift to all
just men, for their eternal benefit.
This gift and this special food rejoice and adorn all great festivals
and all banquets in heaven and on earth. In this gift Christ gives
Himself to us in three ways: He gives us His flesh and His blood
and His bodily life, glorified and full of joys and sorrows; and He
gives us His Spirit, with its supreme faculties, full of glory and of
gifts, of truth and justifying power; and He gives us His personality,
with the divine light which raises His Spirit and the spirits of all
enlightened beings into the sublime unity and joy of God.
Christ desires that we shall remember Him whenever we consecrate,
offer, and receive His body. Consider now in what way we shall remember
Him. We shall observe and examine how Christ inclines Himself towards
us, by loving affection, by great desires, by a tender joy and warm
influence passing into our bodily nature. For He gives us that which
He received from our humanity, His flesh, His blood, and His bodily
nature. We shall likewise observe and examine that precious body,
tortured, furrowed, and wounded with love, because of His faithfulness
towards us. So shall we be adorned and nourished in the lower part
of our human nature. In this sublime gift of the Sacrament He also
gives us His Spirit full of glory, and the richer gifts of virtues and
unspeakable mercies of charity and goodness.
By these we are nourished and adorned and enlightened in the unity of
our spirit and in our higher powers, because Christ with all His riches
dwells within us.
In the sacrament of the altar He further bestows upon us His sublime
personality and His incomprehensible light. Through this we are united
and given up to the Father, and the Father receives His elect children
at the same time as His only begotten Son, and so we reach our divine
inheritance and our eternal felicity.
If a man has diligently considered these things, he will meet Christ
in the same way in which Christ comes to him. He will rise to receive
Christ with eager joy in his heart, his desires, his love, and all
his powers. And it is thus that Christ Himself receives. This joy
cannot possibly be too great, for our nature receives His nature, the
glorified humanity of Christ, full of gladness and merit. Therefore I
desire that in thus receiving man shall, as it were, dissolve and flow
forth through his desires, his joys, and his pleasures, for he receives
the most lovely, the most gracious, and the kindest of the children
of men, and is made one with Him. In this union and this joy great
delights often come to men, and many mysterious and secret marvels of
divine treasures are manifested and revealed. When in so receiving a
man meditates on the torment and the sufferings of this precious body
of Christ of which he is partaking, there sometimes enters into him
a devotion so loving and a compassion so keen that he desires to be
nailed with Christ to the wood of the Cross, and to shed his heart’s
blood in honour of Christ. And he presses into the wounds and into the
open heart of Christ his Saviour. In such exercises revelations and
great benefits have often come to men.