Saturday, March 17, 2018

Eucharistic Meal and Eucharistic Heart


Breaking through barriers (between God and humanity and between human beings, ourselves) is at the core of the Eucharistic meal. The scandal of the Eucharist in the early church was that those who were once considered "outsiders" were now included at the banquet. To break bread together is the ultimate sign of communio. It breaks through the alienation that is caused by exclusion or being rendered invisible.
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This is why Denis Estimon's outreach, "We dine together," is so powerful in the Eucharistic sense. It emerged out of his own pain and loneliness when he was on the margins of his environment in elementary school.
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Following the typical Eucharistic pattern, it was out of his pain that he developed empathy, and out of that empathy that he developed the compassion and sense of solidarity to break through the isolation and loneliness of others. He knew how they felt and he responded.
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If we don't understand anything else about what it means to have "a heart formed after the Eucharist," we should at least understand this.

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