Eucharist Part 3 - Participation in Jesus’ Eucharistic Life, part II
Why I Chose to Remain on Earth in a Host, Path #50-
Why did I choose to remain on earth in a Host? In this way I am present to all, for you to contemplate and to receive Me as living Bread. I remained with you to nourish your life with Divine life. To prepare you, to strengthen you and to become one with you as you journey the path to eternal life in God. I remain in this hidden and ordinary way so that your hidden and ordinary life can be transformed into Divinity and thus participate here on earth in the unity and Divine life of the Most Holy Trinity. The Eucharist is the life of God that has the power to heal and to transform you from within. In the smallness of the Host is revealed the grandeur, majesty and greatness of God. The Eucharist is the greatest miracle of God for humanity. The Eucharist reveals God's faithfulness to His people. The Eucharist reveals what each of you is called to become.
CCC 1368: The Eucharist is also the sacrifice of the Church. The Church which is the Body of Christ participates in the offering of her Head. With him, she herself is offered whole and entire. She unites herself to his intercession with the Father for all men. In the Eucharist the sacrifice of Christ becomes also the sacrifice of the members of his Body. The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering, and so acquire a new value. Christ's sacrifice present on the altar makes it possible for all generations of Christians to be united with his offering.
The Angel of Fatima told the children: Make everything you do a sacrifice, and offer it as an act of reparation for the sins by which He is offended and in supplication for the conversion of sinners… Above all, accept and bear with submission the sufferings sent you by Our Lord. (see Path p. 164-165)
In the next apparition the angel said that those sacrifices and suffering are effective “by offering them in union with the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
Before we can enter a PURE PARTICIPATION in the sacrifice of Jesus, we must come to know ourselves: our wounds, disorders, sin patterns, lies, distorted identity, hardness of heart…. If we don’t, our participation in the life of Christ in the Eucharist will also be a disordered participation -- a participation as the wrong kind of victim – enablers, people pleasers, codependent…. Therefore, The Path brings us to know our TRUE IDENTITIES IN CHRIST and the mission He has given us. As we come to know who we are and our mission in life, we can enter a PURE PARTICIPATION in the sacrifice of Christ as His hidden victims of love.
Trust, I Am the Power of the Hidden Life Path p.165: 51
Trust and place all your confidence in the power of the hidden life being revealed to you now in My Eucharistic presence. I am the power of the hidden life. I want to possess you with My hidden life, which is the Eucharist, transforming you into living hosts.
He Leadeth Me: An Extraordinary Testament of Faith by Walter J. Ciszek, S. J.
We had entered upon what we thought was a great missionary endeavor, full of zeal and enthusiasm, only to come smack up against reality. Things here were not at all as we had envisioned them, and we were not at all equipped to face things as we found them. So much for our hopes, our expectations, our dreams, our convictions, above all, our enthusiasm!
This whole Russian venture seemed now to have been a mistake, an ill-conceived missionary effort based on hopes and dreams rather than on hard facts, a plan born of insufficient information and misinformation.
That was the temptation that Father Nestrov and I faced at Teplaya-Gora. And though our situation may have been somewhat unique, the temptation itself was not. It is the same temptation faced by everyone who has followed a call and found that the realities of life were nothing like the expectations he had in the first flush of his vision and his enthusiasm. It is the temptation that comes to anyone, for example, who has entered religious life with a burning desire to serve God and him alone, only to find that the day-to-day life in religion is humdrum and pedestrian, equally as filled with moments of human misunderstanding, daily routines, and distractions as the secular life he left behind in the world. It is the same temptation faced by young couples in marriage, when the honeymoon is over, and they must face a seemingly endless future of living together and scratching out an existence in the same old place and the same old way. It is the temptation to say: “This life is not what I thought it would be. This is not what I bargained for. It is not at all what I wanted, either. If I had known it would be like this, I would never have made this choice, I would never have made this promise. You must forgive me, God, but I want to go back. You cannot hold me to a promise made in ignorance; you cannot expect me to keep a covenant based on faith without any previous knowledge of the true facts of life. It is not fair. I never thought it would be like this. I simply cannot stand it, and I will not stay. I will not serve.”
(Continuation of the Path, #51)
This transformation will take place as you live your hidden and interior life united to My interior crucifixion, suffering all with Me and in Me. In this way, the power of the hidden force will intensify with the fire of the Holy Spirit. (6/15/11)
(Continuation of the testimony of Fr Ciszek)
Yet the Mass gave us strength.
At the moment of Consecration, God became present in a new way in Teplaya-Gora. He was there, in answer to our petitions, where the sacrifice of Calvary had never been celebrated before. In that sacrament we could offer up all our sacrifices with his, could ask his blessing on those for whom we labored and prayed in secret, for those who themselves were perhaps praying in secret, but who couldn’t worship him publicly. Those were my most consoling thoughts, my happiest moments, in what had turned out to be almost a nonapostolate at Teplaya-Gora. The consolation of that sacrifice, that offering, would stay with me as we returned home through the darkness and silence of the forest. And then one day, together, it dawned on us. God granted us the grace to see the solution to our dilemma, the answer to our temptation. It was the grace quite simply to look at our situation from his viewpoint rather than from Participation in Jesus’ Eucharistic Life, part II 3 ours. It was the grace not to judge our efforts by human standards, or by what we ourselves wanted or expected to happen, but rather according to God’s design. It was the grace to understand that our dilemma, our temptation, was of our own making and existed only in our minds; it did not and could not coincide with the real world ordained by God and governed ultimately by his will.
Genesis 45:4-8: “Come closer to me,” Joseph told his brothers. When they had done so, he said: “I am your brother Joseph, whom you sold into Egypt. But now do not be distressed, and do not be angry with yourselves for having sold me here. It was really for the sake of saving lives that God sent me here ahead of you. The famine has been in the land for two years now, and for five more years cultivation will yield no harvest. God, therefore, sent me on ahead of you to ensure for you a remnant on earth and to save your lives in an extraordinary deliverance. So it was not really you but God who had me come here.
What sufferings & situations in my life have I not yet come to accept as God’s will?
What difficulties & hardships in my life have I not come to see through the eyes of God, but instead remain stuck in myself, focused in my own pain, not able to see outside of myself through the eyes of Christ crucified?
Living Hosts, The Path 3-C-6 p.166
The Venerable Archbishop Luis Maria Martinez observed that the sacrament of Holy Orders unites a priest to Jesus in such a way that, at the moment of the consecration, Jesus—in the priest—changes the substance of bread and wine into Himself by the power of the Holy Spirit. But “total transformation” into a “living host” required something more: It required that a human being—priest, religious, or lay—make the “marvelous exchange” of his independent human will for the Divine Will by allowing the Holy Spirit to unite him to Jesus in all of his acts. “Then, in every moment, we can offer the two victims united in one same
A victim soul VOLUNTARILY makes this “marvelous exchange”
Continuation of the testimony of Fr Ciszek
Our dilemma at Teplaya-Gora came from our frustration at not being able to do what we thought the will of God ought to be in this situation, at our inability to work as we thought God would surely want us to work, instead of accepting the situation itself as his will. It is a mistake easily made by every man, saint or scholar, Church leader or day laborer. Ultimately, we come to expect God to accept our understanding of what his will ought to be and to help us fulfill that, instead of learning to see and accept his will in the real situations in which he places us daily. The simple soul who each day makes a morning offering of “all the prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day”—and who then acts upon it by accepting unquestioningly and responding lovingly to all the situations of the day as truly sent by God—has perceived with an almost childlike faith the profound truth about the will of God. The plain and simple truth is that his will is what he actually wills to send us each day, in the way of circumstances, places, people, and problems.
The Path: #57
Ponder every relationship and situation in your lives where you are not loving with Me, through Me and in Me. Ask yourselves, “Why is it so difficult to love this person or to love in these situations?” It is precisely in those situations and with those persons where you need to be purified.
Pope Francis creates new path to beatification under ‘offering of life’
– in which a person has died prematurely through an offering of their life for love of God and neighbor. In the apostolic letter, Pope Francis wrote that “They are worthy of special consideration and honor, those Christians who, following in the footsteps and teachings of the Lord Jesus, have voluntarily and freely offered their lives for others and have persevered until death in this regard.” The document is titled “maiorem hac dilectionem,” or “greater love than this,” after the verse from the Gospel of John which says: “No one has greater love than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends.”