WHAT EVERY CATHOLIC NEEDS TO KNOW ABOUT THE EUCHARIST A Guide for the Liturgical Assembly Michael Kwatera, OSB saddle, $9.95  Prepublication offer: Free shipping on orders placed before 11/30/08. 64 pages, 5½" x 8½" ISBN 0-89390-680-8 December 2008 View Table of Contents View Excerpt Quantity:

This book gives the historical background of the eucharistic celebration. It locates Eucharist in the context of the rest of the Mass, emphasizing the importance and role of the assembly. It fosters understanding of and appreciation for the celebration and sacrament. The individual will find it inspirational. Parish leaders can use it as the basis for a day of reflection on Eucharist.

About the Author
Michael Kwatera, OSB, serves as Director of Oblates and Director of Liturgy for St. John’s Abbey in Collegeville, Minn. He is also an unofficial chaplain for the Franciscan Sisters of Little Falls, Minnesota. He has served as pastor of several parishes in rural Minnesota and has given workshops on prayer.

Acknowledgments

The Many Passovers of Eucharist
Preparing for our Passover with Christ
All Aboard for God’s Assembly!
What is the Liturgical Assembly?
Who Calls the Assembly?
Who is Called to Participate?
What is the Assembly’s Purpose?
What is the Assembly a Sign or Symbol Of?
God’s Word for the Assembly
Literary Forms
Introductory Rites and Liturgy of the Word
Liturgy of the Eucharist: Eucharistic Prayer
Liturgy of the Eucharist: Communion Rite
Looking for the Perfect Communicant
Liturgy of the Eucharist: Sending Forth
Come, Holy Spirit
Come to the Feast!
A Primer on the Real Presence
Eucharistic Adoration
A Farewell Toast

Bibliography

American families celebrate Thanksgiving on the fourth Thursday in November. It is a day for remembering and celebrating some historical events: that first hard winter for the Pilgrims in Plymouth Colony; the Indians’ helping them to grow corn and escape starvation; and the feast that the thankful Pilgrims gave for the Indians. But Thanksgiving is also a time for remembering and celebrating historical events in our own families (like the birth of a new baby). Thanksgiving is a history feast: it invites us to remember and celebrate our national history and our personal history.

The Jewish people have long celebrated a great history feast of thanksgiving called Passover. This national and family feast celebrates the Israelites’ deliverance from slavery in Egypt around the year 1250 B.C.E. The directions for celebrating the Passover meal form Holy Thursday’s first reading from the book of Exodus. Every year the Israelites remembered and celebrated their deliverance from death in the special foods, words, and songs of the Passover meal.

Jesus was no stranger to the Passover meal and its meaning. He celebrated it many times, the last time with those he numbered as his close friends and helpers. But at the Last Supper, Jesus gave new meaning to the Passover meal. He told his disciples that a new exodus was at hand: he was about to accomplish a new deliverance for his people, a deliverance from slavery to sin and death.

As Jesus and his disciples were celebrating the Exodus from Egypt, Jesus was on his way to his own exodus, to the great event of deliverance accomplished in his death and resurrection. But Jesus left his disciples a sign of his self-giving unto death for the forgiveness of sins. When they offered a prayer of blessing over bread and wine in his memory, that bread and wine would be a sharing in his Body and Blood. The disciples would become one with him in his passing-over from death to life as they shared his Body and Blood.

That passing-over was Jesus’ return to the Father, who had asked him to give his life in service to all. How often Jesus must have felt that his mission was leading to rejection and death; but perhaps at table with his disciples he had the terrifying realization: “It might be tonight!”

Like Jesus as he faced his approaching death, we experience moments where human life is fragile and easily broken: being born, growing up and growing older, being hungry, getting sick, dying. These “passover times” are simply given to us because we are human. They are always with us, or not far from us, and we can’t avoid them. We do not ask to be born, for example, and we can’t plan exactly how we will die. In such times as choosing a vocation or being seriously ill or experiencing deep personal guilt, we know that we can’t stand still: we must pass through or pass over the situation to a different one. That is what Jesus did; and that is why we can, too.

Christ comes to us in the basic experiences of human life so that we can pass through or pass over our times of suffering with him. He invites us to fill our passover times with the power of his own passover from death to life. He enters the fragile experiences of our lives and fills them with the saving power of his own dying and rising. Then our lives seem brighter, happier, holier. In all our passover times, we find the strength that comes from Christ’s own passover from death to life.

Human life really is one great passover from life to death to eternal life, but there are many mini-passovers in our lives: from sickness to health, from brokenness to wholeness, hatred to love, disunity to unity, guilt to forgiveness. The Lord Jesus has given us a special passover moment to strengthen us in our mini-passovers: the Eucharist.

The many passovers of human life come together most visibly in our celebration of the Eucharist. It contains all the passovers of human life: the Jewish Passover meal, the Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples, the passover of Jesus from death on the cross to the new life of his resurrection, the memorial feast of his passover in our sharing of his Body and Blood, and the mini-passovers of our daily lives. The Eucharist unites the passover of Jesus and our passovers in a single event.

The Eucharistic celebration itself is a passover time. Here we give thanks for Christ’s saving presence in all the other passover times of human life. The Eucharist is the life-giving food of travelers, the nourishment we need as we pass over from sin and death to life with Christ. The Lord loves us too much to let us make this passover alone.

Our sharing in the Eucharist commits us to love one another as Jesus has loved us. It commits us to accompany each other through the sad and happy passover times of human life. It commits us to lay down our lives for each other in service.