May 25, 2025, In the Breaking of the Bread

Today in prayer at church, I saw Jesus in his intensely human aspect, bloodied from the crucifixion, yet embodying love. I saw that when we love someone in a corporeal way – such as a parent caring for a baby or an adult embracing a spouse or partner – Jesus’ love is there too in that physical, human, messy, smelly love. That love too is inseparable from Jesus’ love.

I saw too, during the consecration of the Eucharist, that when Jesus’ body was broken at the crucifixion, as foreshadowed in the breaking of the bread at the Last Supper, as re-lived in the Eucharist at the service or Mass, so that in receiving the Eucharist Christ’s body becomes one with us, by that breaking, Jesus broke the barrier between human and divine. Jesus broke open the boundary between our humanness and God.  This breaking open is re-enacted every time we receive the Eucharist, as it enters our body. As the Gospel of John tells us over and over, Jesus is in us and we are in him, as he is in God and God is in him. Amen.