Night Prayer on Sundays draws from some element of the day's liturgy. Tonight's entry is a little different but I hope it will lead you to a place of prayer...
We find ourselves in Year B of the three volume lectionary from which the scripture readings at Sunday Mass are taken. In Year B, there are five Sundays in the northern hemisphere's summer when the gospel is taken from the sixth chapter of John where Jesus preaches at length on the Bread of Life. While the regular Sunday-to-Sunday continuum of gospel stories presents us with a variety of events in the life of Jesus, this five week series focuses almost exclusively on the Eucharist. (You can find the first two of my homilies in this Bread of Life series here and here.)
This summer, this Bread of Life series comes our way just after the 10th National Eucharistic Congress which took place in Indianapolis with huge processions and hours of adoration - and the opening ceremonies of the XXXIII Olympiad of the modern era. The former is the centerpiece of a three year effort by the USCCB to revitalize Catholics' belief in the Eucharist and the latter... well, the latter has been the center of a great and often acriomonious debate.
And yet it was the Olympic event that stimulated in me a deep reflection on the Eucharist: I needed to discover and understand why the opening ceremony in Paris had so deeply disappointed me. I shared some of this reflection in an earlier post:
It would not be an exaggeration to say that my whole life has revolved around the meal Jesus shared with his friends on the night before he died: for this I was ordained and by this I have been sustained.I have spent my life leading people to the altar t0 break open the bread of God's wisdom in the scriptures and then, nourished by it, proceed to make a sacrifice of praise, offering gifts of bread and wine, recalling and receiving in communion the mystery of Christ's gift of his body and blood - for us and for our salvation.It's through the celebration of the Eucharist that most of you reading this post have come to know me. And it's the prayer that flows from our altar-table that keeps us in communion with one another now, no matter how many the miles that separate us.
For tonight's prayer, I''m posting a hymn that many of us have been singing for 68 years: I Am the Bread of Life by Sr. Suzanne Toolan. (See here for an interesting story of this song's origin.) I'm especially pleased to offer this arrangement by the Sunday 7 PM Choir. We've all heard this song sung at full voice and hammered out on strummed guitars (been there, did that!). This talented choir from Saint Francis de Sales Parish in Ajax, Ontario presents the sung in an understated fashion that gives us plenty of breathing room for praying this beautiful words from the lips of Jesus...
I Am the Bread of Life by Suzanne Toolan
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