The Eucharist SPEAKS TO US

A few weeks ago, I wrote in the bulletin about a French priest and author who died in 1982, Father Jean du Cœur de Jésus d’Elbée. As the Church in the United States continues to celebrate a Eucharistic revival and renewal this year, Father d’Elbée wrote beautifully on the Eucharist. He wrote, “…The Host speaks to us. The living silence of the Host preaches a heavenly peace. Jesus expects to find it at least in the hearts of his friends, since it is the heritage which we have received from him. He finds it so seldom!”
 
I love Father d’Elbée’s description of the Eucharist as “speaking to us”—if we believe that the Eucharist is our Lord Jesus Christ, it should speak to us. There is, in fact, a ‘living silence’ in the Eucharist. I am reminded of a story about St. John Vianney. He once encountered an old man staring at the tabernacle in the parish church. St. John Vianney asked the old man what he was doing. The old man looked at his parish priest and explained the heart—and essence—of all prayer in one immortal sentence: “I look at him, and he looks at me.” The Eucharist speaks and preaches to us in ‘living silence.’ We have to be able to listen to that silence, just as the old man did in the parish church of Ars, France. We live in such a noisy and rushed world: we scarcely have time to just sit in the presence of our Eucharistic Lord and listen to Jesus speak to us.
 
Father d’Elbée writes that in the silence, the Host preaches a heavenly peace. This is no ordinary peace, but rather the peace Jesus speaks of in John 14:27: Peace I leave with you; my peace I give to you. Not as the world gives do I give it to you. Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid. It is the peace of the Prince of Peace. Because this is a heavenly peace, we should not be troubled or afraid. Even with the chaos and turmoil in our world today, we must follow the Lord’s command to not let our hearts be troubled; and so, we must listen to the “sermon of heavenly peace” from our Lord and pray for that peace which the world cannot give.
 
Father d’Elbée ends by saying that “It is through the hearts of those who love Jesus and whom he has filled with his divine peace, choosing the weak to confound the strong, that Jesus radiates peace in the world. The first way to work for peace in the world is to let Jesus establish it in our souls.” And so that is our marching orders: to love Jesus, to allow ourselves to be filled with his peace, so that Jesus might radiate his peace in our world. Jesus wants to establish peace in our souls—not just any peace, mind you, but that peace which the world cannot give—and then radiate that peace through us out into the world. It’s a tall order, but one that we receive strength to accomplish through the Eucharist. In Dante’s Paradiso, there is a character named Picarda, a nun who had broken her vows but repented and arrived in Paradise, who sums all this up in one memorable line: “In His Will is our peace.”