Reading in Exile

Today, at my family's beloved parish of St. Agnes , we had a lovely Corpus Christi procession, after Fr. Mark Pavlak's first Mass, set to Mozart's Mass in C Major . Today, on the streets of St. Paul, our God walked among us, radiant in His beauty, arrayed for love and battles. What joy there is in a Eucharistic procession, to walk in the ranks of Our Lord, to follow behind Him as a member of His army with my fellow soldiers, singing his praises, or to walk before Him as my eldest daughter did, sprinkling rose petals before His Sacred Feet. What unity with all Christendom, past, present, and future, I felt, walking as a foot soldier in that marvelous pilgrimage. I can put my feelings no better than Dom Gueranger did, in his Liturgical Year , quoting Fr. Faber at length: "But to us Catholics, faithful adorers of the Sacrament of love, Oh! the joy of the immense glory the Church is sending up to God this hour! verily as if the world was all unfallen still...How many glo...

Today, the Church celebrates the Feast of Corpus Christi; indeed, not only is today given over to the celebration of the most holy Body and Blood of Our Lord, but the next seven days as well, after which we shall be presented with the holy mystery of Our Lord's Sacred Heart (to which my family is consecrated.) To receive a Sacrament is to be initiated into the power and energeia, the activity, of God. I know that I too often think of the Sacraments, even the Blessed Sacrament, occasionalistically--that is, I think of my reception of the Sacrament just as an occasion for God to act upon me, rather than thinking of the Sacrmanet as really having the causal power to bring about God's power and activity in me. But God's action upon us is nearly always mediated by creaturely causality. And in the Sacraments God does not just act upon us in the way He does in all natural events, moving creaturely causes to their natural activities as the primary cause of all creaturely events ...