Christ had nothing of His own, but all was held in common, body and soul, mother and disciples, tunic and cloak. He ate and drank for us, He lived and toiled for us. His toil and grief and misery were indeed His own, but the blessings and the good which flowed from them were the common possession of all. And the glory of His merits shall be the possession of all throughout eternity.
How Christ gave Himself to us in the Sacrament
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.
The Soul’s Hunger for God
Here there begins an eternal hunger, which shall nevermore be satisfied. It is the yearning and the inward aspiration of our faculty of love, and of our created spirit towards an uncreated good. And as the spirit desires joy, and is invited and constrained by God to partake of it, it is always longing to realise joy. Behold then the beginning of an eternal aspiration and of eternal efforts, while our impotence is likewise eternal. These are the poorest of all men, for they are eager and greedy, and they can never be satisfied. Whatever they eat or drink, they can never have enough, for this hunger lasts continually. For a created vessel cannot contain an uncreated good, and hence that continual struggle of the hungry soul, and its feebleness which is swallowed up in God. There are here great banquets of food and drink, which none knoweth saving he who partakes of them; but full satisfaction of joy is the food which is ever lacking, and so the hunger is perpetually renewed. Yet streams of honey flow within reach, full of all delights, for the spirit tastes these pleasures in every imaginable way, but always according to its creaturely nature and below God, and that is why the hunger and the impatience are without end. If God were to grant to this man all the gifts which are possessed by all the saints, and everything that He has to offer, but were to deny Himself, the open-mouthed eagerness of his spirit would be still hungry and unsatisfied. Emotion and the inward contact with God are the explanation of our hunger and our striving; for the Spirit of God gives chase to our spirit, and the closer the contact the greater the hunger and the striving. This is the life of love in its highest development, above reason and higher than all understanding; for in such love reason can neither give nor take away, for our love is in touch with the divine love. And I think that once this point is reached there will be no more separation from God. The contact of God with us, so long as we feel it, and our own loving efforts, are both created and of the nature of the creature, and so they may grow and increase all the days of our life.