A life we call 'empty' is in fact full of God

                        Book 1, Chapter 2

-Part 7-

Lest we relapse into that shallow notion that the will of God is just so much useful information that we happen by either mystically in contemplation, observantly in study, or experientially in the ordinary, we are reminded that any realization of God’s will in our lives by these means is an incidence of God giving himself to us.

_{“all crosses, all actions, all spiritual impulses that are in the divine design give us god ….” (Page 30)}

Here he compares God giving himself to us moment by moment in love to the giving of himself that God expresses in the Eucharist.

It must be in the back of every Catholic mind that the Bread and Wine of the Eucharistic Sacrament is a very humble step for the Lord to take, time and time again. In these years as a Catholic convert, nothing has been more striking to me than the words of the priest at Mass, when he holds before us the Bread and the Cup and declares, “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. Happy are those who are called to his supper.”

Only faith allows me to keep my place in the sanctuary at this particular moment. If I do not believe that the Bread has become the resurrected Body, and the Wine the risen Blood, then I would need to run from the room for fear of idolatry. Only an idiot would call something manmade and ordinary his god. In the Mass, there is no mistaking the declared identity of the One being shown to us by the priest – the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world. That is Jesus Christ, and no one else.

There is a significant line in the sand drawn here. Either the Catholic Church is wrong – and the Eucharist is the worst idolatry to ever infect the church, or the Catholic Church is right – and the Eucharist is a living, mysterious sacrament that many believers snub.

Whether one is disposed to believe this, it is undoubtedly the good father’s view that the Eucharist is an incident wherein God gives us himself in a special, sacramental way.

He means to make the sacrament and the ordinary moments of our lives touch with this thought in common: Out of his love for us, God gives us himself in mysterious and surprising ways – even in ways that “might appear to injure” us.

Again we are given hope that a life that has been invaded by poverty, illness, loss, suffering, blandness, discord, disability, incompleteness or injustice, is a life that has meaning because God has given himself to the one so invaded through those very unattractive means. A life that we might call “empty,” is in fact full of God mysteriously giving himself to the suffering one.