“Christ’s body is given to you in the form of bread and his blood in the form of wine, so that, having partaken of the body and blood of Christ, you may be one body and one blood with him. Thus we become “bearers of Christ” [Christophorus]. As his body and blood flow through our members, this is how we become partakers of the divine nature. Once, speaking to the Jews, Christ said: “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life within you” (Jn 6:54). If the bread and wine seem purely natural to you, do not dwell on that… If your senses deceive you, let faith reassure you.
So when you approach to receive it, do not step forward disrespectfully, with your palms outstretched and fingers spread. But since the King is to rest upon your right hand, make a throne for him with your left hand, and in the hollow of your hand receive the Body of Christ and respond: Amen!”
These words of St Cyrille bishop of Jerusalem in the 4th century capture well the mystery of the Eucharist. About the Incarnation St Leo speaks of an admirable exchange that can be read also for what is lived in the Eucharist: and we find the same words when the priest mixes the water in the chalice before the offerings.
“O admirabile commercium: O marvelous exchange! Man’s/Humankind’s Creator has become man, born of a virgin. We have been made sharers in the divinity of Christ who humbled himself to share in our humanity”.
The Eucharist is the same Mystery. Christ gives himself totally, loving us till the end, and we become partakers of his divine nature. We are in awe before this total self-giving of Christ Risen who transforms bread and wine into his Body and blood. Body for the Jews tradition means the whole person, not only the physical body.
At the offertory we bring bread and wine, all our lives, our experiences, our sufferings. Bread, the symbol od our nurturing, means life. The wine is not indispensable to life, but it brings abundance, joy, something of the more that makes life delightful. Jesus takes all this into account to give it an unimaginable meaning: he becomes our bread for a life that death cannot destroy, our wine for eternal joy. “I am the bread of life”. Jn 6: 35. St Augustine says this in this way:
If you are the body of Christ, it is your mystery that lies on the altar.
Then we approach the altar for Communion. The word “Communion” should not be taken lightly: it means “to form a community,” and this community is built on and given meaning through the sharing of food that makes us all “one” in Christ himself.
I was looking in the RB and in our Constitutions, to find what it is said about the Eucharist: no theological treatise; just in the CST, 18:
The Eucharist is the source and summit of the whole Christian life and of the sisters’ communion in Christ (from the Constitution on the Liturgy,1965).
This is not extraordinary; it is maybe the best way to understand that our life is Eucharistic.
How? How do we form community, how are we one in Christ?
The life and the joy, the bread and the wine, we receive can only be fulfilled in our becoming one body: any division from others reveals itself as a division within ourselves, and we know that this brings death, not life.
Our Constitution 14 says:
The community forms a single body in Christ. Each sister is to contribute to the upbuilding of relations within the community, especially by sharing with others the spiritual gifts she has received by God’s manifold grace.
The community we are invited to build is not a small group of people who share a similar outlook on life and become insular and self-satisfied. No, the One who is the core of our vocation, of our life, sends us to build HIS body, his Church. “In illo uno unum,” which translates to “In the One, we are one”, the motto of Pope Leo XIV.
How to make a throne with our left hand and in the hollow of our right hand, of our being, of our incompleteness, and receive the Body of Christ, our sisters, what is before us this morning?
Each one will find her own answer. “Where your treasure is, there your heart will be also”. Mt 6: 21.
“Become what you receive”, St Augustine reminds us.
Sr. Claire Bouttin, Superior, Redwoods Abbey
Corpus Christi, Sunday June 7, 2026
(Dt 8: 2-3, 14b-16a; Ps 146 (147): 12-13, 14-15, 19-20; 1 Cor 10: 16-17; Jn 6: 51-58)
