St. Columban/Thanksgiving

THE GIFT OF HIMSELF
From “The Reed of God” by Caryll Houselander 5
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On the night before He died Christ took bread into His hands, blessed and
broke it, and gave it to His disciples, saying: “This is my Body.” The Blessed
Sacrament is Christ, the whole Christ. He was giving us Himself… Yet, in giving
Himself to the world, He deliberately chose to emphasize the body. Why? The
body is, for us, the means by which we can give ourselves wholly. We say: “God,
my thoughts are with you,” or “My soul goes with you.” And we know that, though
something of ourself is with the traveler, essentially we remain separate from
him… But when we give our body willingly to another as the means of deliberate
self-donation, then our union with the other is complete…

We surrender our intimacy, the secret of ourselves, with the giving of our
body; and we cannot give it without our will, our thoughts, our minds, and our
souls. Christ surrendered the secret of Himself to each one of us when He gave us
His Body. In Holy Communion this surrender of the secret of Himself goes on.
“With desire,” He said, “have I desired this hour.” The hour when He was to
consecrate bread, in order that not only to the whole race would He give His Spirit,
but to each individual, the gift of Himself. He had longed for it – that is what the
phrase means; longed for the moment when He would give us the Body that Mary
had given to Him in Communion. He waited thirty-three years in time for the Last
Supper; two thousand years for me…

He gave Himself through His body from the beginning to the end in tears, in
sweat, in weariness; with spoken words, with glances of love; walking the dusty
roads, visiting the homes of His friends and His enemies; in the gift of His blood.
The part that the pain and privation of His body played in our redemption we
know and meditate often: the poverty, the toil, the fasting, the crucifixion. We
think less often of the joy that should be ours through Christ’s body… No one ever
enjoyed life as he did. He gathered up the color, sound, touch, meaning of
everything about him and united it all to the exquisite sensitiveness, the most pure
capacity for delight.

Most people know the sheer wonder that goes with falling in love, how not
only does everything in heaven and earth become new, but the lover himself
becomes new. It is literally like the sap rising in the tree, putting forth new green
shoots of life. The capacity for joy is doubled, the awareness of beauty sharpened,
the power to do and enjoy creative work increased immeasurably. The heart is
enlarged, there is more sympathy, more warmth, in it than ever before. The lover’s
mind is vibrant with his new life, every sense quickened; and while his blood races,
an immense power of tenderness makes him so much the ruler and master of all
this passion of joy, that he is able to bestow it on another with such restraint, such
gentleness, that however frail she is, she can receive it…

Christ on earth was a human being in love. His love gave life to all loves. He
was love itself. He infused his life with all the grace of its outward and inward
joyfulness, with all its poetry and song, with all its gaiety and laughter and grace.
With His body He united Himself to the world… It is not in making our flesh
unfeeling that we hallow God’s name on earth but in offering it to God burning
with the flame of life. Everything can be put into the fire that Christ came to kindle;
and whether it be the bitter wood of sorrow or the substance of joy, it will burn
upwards with the same splendor of light.

5 The Reed of God, NY 1944, 84-87, 90.