Eucharistic Reflection - The Purpose Of Communion

(Photo by Sylvain Brison on Unsplash)

“The sovereign purpose of Communion is to produce a unity of life and of person between our Lord and ourselves; it is not perfect if we do not arrive at this, for it is not only our works which He wants in coming to us but ourselves.

It seems to me that on leaving the Tabernacle to come into us, our Lord says: ‘I will Incarnate Myself in this person. I will unite myself with her sacramentally in order that My personality may take the place of her own; I want to be her principle and raise her being and her actions to a divine unity; I will think and will in her soul; I will live in her body; I will love in her heart; I will glorify My Father in her as I glorified Him on earth in My sacred humanity; I will continue for the glory of My Father, for love of Him and of this creature, my meritorious and suffering life; I will give a supernatural and divine value to her acts; I will be the center of her affections and the principle of a new life which will be the reproduction of my own life’.

By all means walk in this way. Become the real servants of the divine person of Jesus Christ in you; more than that, become His victims, for God is a consuming fire. As the word immolated and consumed His humanity by a life of continual suffering in soul and body and by His death on the cross, thus once having given yourself to Jesus Christ, He will immolate you totally.

In practice it is like this: first of all you must look for nothing for yourself; refuse all esteem and all affection from creatures; allow them to despise and persecute you without complaining and recognize that nothing could be more just. This is hard, certainly, but you are destroying yourself in order to live.”

(Saint Peter Julian Eymard from The Eucharist and Christian Perfection, Part I)