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Love the Mass! Live the Mass!
by Joan Carter McHugh
In a box of treasures I retrieved from the basement recently, I found a paper I wrote in senior year of high school entitled, The Real Presence. As an adolescent I had a deep devotion to the Mass and the Eucharist, thanks mainly to the teaching and example of the Religious of the Sacred Heart who left no stone unturned in helping us appreciate the value of the Mass.
Mass is a perfect prayer of infinite value, I wrote. To be at Mass, which is an unbloody reenactment of Christ's death, is to be at the foot of the Cross where Jesus offers His life to God for us. Christ's sacrifice on Calvary took place once and for all, but through the Mass the fruits of His sacrifice are applied to us in our life now. No more perfect prayer or perfect sacrifice could ever be conceived than the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass because we have a God praying to God for us. At Mass we need only unite our heart, our prayer, our sacrifice with Christ's, then our prayer, like His, becomes perfect. We are co-offerers with the priest of adoration, praise, thanksgiving and reparation to the Father through the redeeming love and death of His Son. God our Father in heaven accepts these fruits of love, which now have an infinite value because they issue from the infinite heart of Christ, and sends them back to us in the form of graces and blessings that we need for ourselves.
I knew even as an adolescent that Calvary was the real seat of power in the world and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass was the means God gave us of sharing in His power. I trusted that when our lives, our needs, our loved ones, are united to Christ and offered through His sacrifice to the Father at Mass, they are transformed, just as the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ. At the Consecration we can imitate St. Gertrude who put her mind, will, body, soul and heart into the chalice asking that the Lord to change them into Himself. It is through the Mass that each of us must be changed into the likeness of Christ. And this transformation of us into Christ can be effected only by suffering and by sacrifice.
For several years the Lord has been calling me to live the Mass, to offer my life to Him every morning at Mass and then to yield to the changes He wants me to make in order to conform my life to His. When I was an adolescent I offered Him the pain and loneliness of growing up in a family suffering from the wounds of mental illness and alcoholism. I always left Church feeling better and able to cope because Jesus held my pain for me. When I was older and able to deal with the problems, He led me through spiritual direction and inner healing to the source of the pain, my own broken heart which had turned to stone because of all the hurt and abuse. It took time and work to let go of all the repressed negative emotions that bound me in shame and anger. He is answering my prayers by freeing me from the prison of denial and blame.
Several years ago I was diagnosed with scleroderma, a connective tissue disease caused by an overproduction of collagen in the blood. My dysfunctional immune system produces an abnormal amount of antibodies which mistakenly attack the healthy tissues, resulting in a hardening and swelling of the blood vessels. It can be fatal if it decides to attack the internal organs. Sometimes I think I contracted the disease because of my dysfunctional emotional system, because of the way I internalized pain and suffering for so many years. When I first became sick, the scleroderma was sapping my strength and draining life from me. I daily offered Jesus my life and disease at Mass and asked Him to transform it into Him. At the darkest hour of my sickness when I could hardly walk or hold a pen to write because of the swelling in my hands, I got a phone call from a friend who just happened to read about a protocol for rheumatoid arthritis, scleroderma and lupus in one of her husband's medical journals. I investigated the information (which is not known to many people) which led me to a source of treatment and to a wonderful doctor who, by God's grace, put this disease in remission!
When I spoke at a Prayer Breakfast in Galveston, Texas, (at the invitation of Fr. Bob DeGrandis) I had the opportunity to have dinner with Fr. Charles Banet, a 73 year old priest who has suffered from a blood disease he has had since he was a child. On top of that he had recently been diagnosed with prostate cancer but had to discontinue radiation therapy. He only had a short time to live. One day while he was saying Mass he was about to drink the Precious Blood when he said, Jesus. . . I want. . . if you can afford it. . .I'd like a transfusion of Your Blood in anticipation of the evaluation they're going to make of my blood tomorrow. The next day his blood tested perfect for the first time since his childhood. Today he is completely healthy and cancer free and no medical explanation was ever given for the healing of his blood. Fr. Banet had been a priest for 47 years in the same order, The Missionaries of the Most Precious Blood. Jesus never turned anyone away who came to Him for healing. He healed them all Scripture tells us. He healed the woman with a hemorrhage, the man born blind, the lepers, He reached out His hand to Peter's mother-in-law and the fever left her, he raised Lazarus from the dead, He said a few words over the water and it became wine. Why would He not heal us, too, when we reach out to Him during Mass and touch His Real Presence with our faith? Just as Jesus transforms the Bread and wine into His Body and Blood during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, so does He transform our brokenness into wholeness, our sorrow into joy, our darkness into light, our sickness into health!
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