What feeds your spirit? What nurtures and strengthens your inner self? Today’s Gospel echoes the prophetic words of the Second Vatican Council when it described the Eucharist as ‘the summit and source’ of the Christian life. My own personal Eucharistic theology is quite simple. I bring the many and varied eucharistic moments and encounters of my day to the Eucharist. The Eucharist then nourishes and missions me into the vineyards of life to be what has intimately nourished my spirit, my soul. The Eucharist is the summit of my many eucharistic encounters, I bring them with me to the table.

At the table of the Eucharist, I am fed by the Word and then by the Eucharist – it becomes my heart source to truly encounter the Christ in the people and events of my life. Our ego will whisper, ‘You don’t need all of this – you can do it all alone!’ Further on in Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, many of the disciples stop following Jesus because ‘the teaching is too hard for them!’

The depth of the Eucharist is that which feeds our spirits beyond our fades and favours, what and who we like and do not like, our moods and our fickle responses. The Eucharist will invite us and challenge us to see Christ in the faces and places where we do not wish to see him. The Eucharist will nourish us in our times of pain and our times of joy. That is why we call it, the ‘bread of life!’

by Br Damien Price cfc