One concern very often raised by parents is how difficult it is to make their children go to Mass. Even in my work 20 years ago, it was a dilemma—some of our students stop going to Mass after graduation.
When I used to discuss not going to Mass with high school students, I would often pose a straightforward question: “If I ask you to go to Mass, will you go?” Since I also ask to be given an honest answer, I often get a “no.”
This is followed by a request: “Can you promise me one thing? Can you pray that God gives you the grace of a love for the Mass?” I always get a “yes” on this one.
Today we celebrate the Feast of Corpus Christi, the last Sunday “celebration” before we completely shift to “ordinary time.”
Points of reflection
Today, I enjoin you—together with your family and/or whatever community you belong to—to carry a conversation on what the Mass is to each of you. I pray the following points for reflection help in your conversation.
Sharon Daloz Parks describes Sunday Mass on a college campus in the US in “Big Questions, Worthy Dreams.”
It is “… a place where a very large number… gather and the full spectrum of their lives is acknowledged. (They) come pouring in… to a place where they know they will see each other, they will have hearth and table, they will be ‘fed,’ and then they will be sent out with a sense of purpose. They are offered access to a living tradition: story and myth, symbol, song, and sacrament, by and through which they may discover and name their own spiritual experience and intuitions.”
This description of young people’s experience of the Mass gives us hope. Should we not dream, hope, pray and work to make this our own experience of the celebration of the Mass, where we remember the Paschal Mystery, the Lord’s offering of his body and blood; a celebration where we are “fed” and from which we are “sent out with a sense of purpose?”
‘Bread of the dream’
Fr. Catalino G. Arevalo, SJ, once referred to the Eucharist as “the bread of the dream”; God’s dream for us to live the fullness of life that the Body and Blood of Christ gives us a real grace that can inspire us to a life of wholeness, gratitude and loving service.
I’ve always believed that the first “task” of a mentor is to ask the one he/she is to journey with what his/her dream is. I still believe this but this has deepened, and is best captured by a line from Rainer Maria Rilke, “I live not in dreams but in contemplation of a reality that is perhaps the future.”
The Eucharist, Sunday Mass, is our sacred space where we go home to again and again, where we know we will see each other, and bring our dreams and hopes together. We go home because we know we will find others there who love us.
This is the inspiration of the Eucharist, to live such a contemplative life that builds the future, the Kingdom of God. —CONTRIBUTED