The Eucharist

We ought to pay God honor in every way we can think of; for every creature, even the tiny insects, if they could only understand, would be bound to look up at the Blessed Sacrament and bow down before him.  Yet there is a higher level at which we can praise God.  We can love him ardently, and want him in the depths of our souls, with all our intellect and all our reason.  This is far better than any outward act that we can perform.  Still, there is another level, even higher:  to acknowledge in the depths of our souls that God is so great and we are so small that it is impossible for us to praise him.  This is in itself an act of praise far beyond all words and thoughts and understanding.

A great teacher has said:  "The man who speaks best about God is the man who has recognized his inward riches and is silent"...  God's incomprehensible glory is so great that merely to acknowledge it comprehends all words and all forms.  The soul praises him by being engulfed in him, losing itself in him, sinking down and melting into him, sharing in God's own praising and thanking of himself for his own being.

Our dear Lord said:  "Caro mea, My flesh is truly food, and My blood is truly drink; whoever feeds on Me remains in Me, and I in him"...  It was not enough for him to become our brother, to take upon himself our human nature.  It was not enough that he should become man so that man might become God.  He wanted to be our food as well.  Saint Augustine said:  "There is no people so great as the Christian people; none of them has a god so close to them as our God is to us."  We feed upon our God.  How wonderful and inexpressible is this love of his, that found this marvelous way for him to come to us!  His love is beyond all comprehension, and it should pierce us all to the heart that he shows such incomparable love toward us.

-Father John Tauler, O.P.

Father Tauler (1361) was a German Dominican priest, a popular preacher, and a mystical theologian.