Eucharistic Prayer: A Celebration
by Fr. Erasto Fernandez
When Eucharist is truly celebrated as berakah, it cannot but be a 'joyful celebration.' Today we no more speak of 'saying Mass', or of 'offering Mass', but rather of 'celebrating Eucharist.' What is the difference? Is it only a matter of words? What is it that makes the Eucharist a true celebration?
What is a Celebration?
A celebration is a festive manifestation of gratitude and joy over blessings received! It is generally always done in community and never alone! Most celebrations include some eating and drinking and other manifestations of joy like singing and dancing. The key to a good celebration though is the Reason for the celebration, which is generally shared by all the participants. The reason for any celebration is always something good that has happened to me/us, a blessing we have received, a danger averted, a success achieved. The more personal and unusual the blessing, the more the joy in celebrating; also, the more we have struggled or waited to obtain this blessing, the deeper the sense of joy that prevails. Think, e.g. of the celebration held all over the country when India secured Independence as a nation. This blessing came after several years of intense struggle and hence the joy was correspondingly deep and lasting.
In 2 Cor. 5:14-15 Paul writes: "For the love of Christ controls us because we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who for their sakes died and was raised." Jesus literally died 'in place of' me, a sinner, because he identified himself with sinners and from within our sinful situation he accepted death to give me/us the chance to live in place of him. Like St. Maximillian Kolbe, he took my place and died so that now I am alive living in place of Christ. The love (see Rom. 5:5-8) that moved God to send his son Jesus to die 'in place of' me then is unimaginable. When I am 'convinced' of (or deeply and personally realize) this, that is when this love of Christ will drive/urge me on to live not for myself but for him. Paul realized all this and hence he could say: 'The life I now live in this body, I live in faith: faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me" (Gal. 2:20).
The more we reflect on God's goodness to us seen at every step of our lives, the easier it is for us to come to Eucharist to celebrate. "An unreflected life is not worth living." When the 'reason' is conscious and personal, the celebration attains a high pitch of joyful celebration. When it is shared so as to become common to all who participate, there is another important consequence, namely that the celebrating group is welded into a true 'community.'
Our reasons for Eucharist
What do we celebrate in the Eucharist? We list here only the common reasons we have; the personal ones would need to be thought out individually:
- God's gratuitous, unsolicited gift of his love - in human form: Jesus. New Covenant
- Forgiveness - freely and repeatedly … no trace or remembrance of past offences
- The dying-rising of Jesus and his total unqualified victory
- The gift of the Church … guidance; community support and encouragement…
- See Eucharistic Prayer - Preface and the Prayer itself.
- Other blessings daily received, all summed up in Eph. 1:3-10; 1 Jn. 3:1-3; Rom. 8:31 - What can separate us from the love of Christ…?
We will have many more reasons for celebrating when we learn how to pick out God's love for us from Sacred Scripture, as we have outlined earlier. The key seems to be to have this question at the back of our mind before beginning the reading. 'Which qualities of God are revealed to me in this passage?' When we focus on God's qualities first, and only later on what the passage asks us to 'do' we find that the message of Sacred Scriptures is very inspiring and 'nourishing.' We also begin to notice how the Scriptural stories are really the story of our own lives: not so much his-tory, but the my-stery of God's love for us here and now.
We further notice that such an approach to celebrating Eucharist enables us to have a very positive self-image. Even while we are deeply conscious of our own failings, yet we realize that God loves us just as much as before. It is this love and acceptance from God that enables us to view ourselves differently. A very healthy offshoot of this is that we also begin to view others much more positively, even while being aware of their shortcomings.
It would be good, therefore, to develop the habit of recalling our personal reasons for celebrating before beginning each Eucharist. The clearer and more conscious this awareness is, the more intense will be our rejoicing. Further, we need to train ourselves to also genuinely rejoice over the good fortune of others. Thus, at every turn throughout the day, we would encounter reasons to rejoice as we experience God's presence and power all around us.
How do we celebrate? The key attitudes we bring to the celebration are:
- Joy: We have a song in our hearts … Jesus has risen and is with us.
- Wholehearted response - external and internal; we mean what we say/do/sing.
- Unqualified acceptance of the others celebrating with us … we enter into and share their reasons too… we offer real forgiveness to all.
- Openness to share our blessings with others and to receive from them too.
- To recall the celebration often during the day we frame our key experience of the Eucharist into a 'mantra' or ejaculatory prayer and repeat/sing it often during the day.
Who celebrates?
When we reflect on stories like Luke's ch. 15: 'Lost coin, lost sheep and lost son', we realize that it is the Father who celebrates and invites us to join in the celebration. So, in a sense, we have no right to come to the Eucharist with a gloomy attitude. If we are not ready to celebrate, then we should be gracious enough not to come at all - because all that goes on at the Eucharist is a celebration and our presence there should not be like a 'wet blanket' on others and on the proceedings. Rather our presence should be an encouragement for others to join in the celebration as well. The Kingdom is often described in the Gospels as a Wedding banquet - a festive celebration of our union with God in covenant.
But then, what about our recurring sins and failings? As long as we genuinely and humbly acknowledge them and surrender them into God's hands, they are no hindrance to our rejoicing. In fact, a good part of our rejoicing is over the fact that our sins do not in any way come between God's love and us. His love for us does not diminish because we have failed him. Rather, he loves us all the more in our weakness and invites us to come to the one source of healing: his unconditional love. All this will sound like so much theory until we personally experience unqualified acceptance from some other person - someone, may be, in our family, from among our friends and acquaintances. Only then will we have a deep conviction that our innate weakness doesn't make any difference at all to God's generous love for us. Against this background, we reflect how tremendously important it is that we ourselves offer such unconditional love to others - having tasted God's love in and through us, they in turn will then be able to pass it on to others.
Joy of the Kingdom
Joy is characteristic of Jesus, our Saviour and of the messianic age he inaugurates. At the Annunciation Mary is invited to rejoice. After his birth angels announced tidings of great joy to all people of goodwill. The Shepherds and Magi too rejoiced on seeing the Christ-child. Jesus often spoke of joy, as when he said that Abraham rejoiced at the thought of the eschatological era. A woman goes through great suffering at child-birth, but rejoices nonetheless at the birth of a new human being. All the parables about the kingdom emphasize the fact of joy that people experience when they discover the kingdom in their midst (pearl, treasure in the field, the lost coin, sheep, son and so on). Notice how often joy is mentioned in the Last Supper discourse (Jn. 15:11; 16:22; 17:13; 1 Jn. 1:4; 2 Jn. 12). The early Christians "partook of food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having favour with all the people" (Acts 2:46). Every meal was a joyous celebration for them - in fact, being alive itself was a reason for rejoicing. Paul writes to the Philippians: "I want you to be happy, always happy in the Lord. I repeat, what I want is your happiness (4:4-5). Ps. 33 in a modern translation begins with: 'God is here, let us celebrate.' This is the 'good news' that we Christians have to offer the world, a joy for which the world is waiting with eager longing.
The Joy of the Lord is my strength
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Copyright © Fr. Erasto Fernandez. All rights reserved.
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