Christ

“To them God has chosen to make known among the Gentiles the glorious riches of this mystery, which is Christ in you, the hope of glory.”

— Colossians 1:27

He confirmed through a report by Zenit, a global Catholic news agency that the theme Pope Francis approved for the 51st International Eucharistic Congress to be held in Cebu, Philippines from the 25th to the 31st of January 2016 is “Christ in you, our hope of glory.”

He had been thinking about the line, part of a verse taken from Saint Paul’s letter to the Colossians after he started hearing about the theme. Since the line began with “Christ,” he chose to read excerpts of the section titled “I believe in Jesus Christ” in Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger’s book “Introduction to Christianity.”

He found it fascinating that the theme approved by the current Successor of Saint Peter should lead him to the retired one, Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI who before becoming emeritus announced at the end of the 50th International Eucharistic Congress in Dublin, Ireland in June 2012 that it will next be held in Cebu.

He also found it serendipitous that just as the Eucharistic Congress is moving from an ancient Catholic bastion, the land of Saint Patrick and a host of saints in the West to a relatively younger one in the Far East, he found the Ratzinger volume in a Japanese bookstore when he left the Philippines, the land of Saints Pedro Calungsod and Lorenzo Ruiz for a trip to Malaysia, an officially Islamic country.

Bedtimes when he perused the Pope Emeritus’ decidedly philosophical-theological tome, his nose bled, figuratively of course, but he persevered because the nuggets of wisdom His Holiness placed after he laid the premises were worth the effort.

To him, the most touching insight Benedict shared was the novelty of his being God’s anointed, his being the Christ, his being the Messiah. He already learned in high school that “Christ” means the one God chose to save his people Israel, not from Roman subjugation in the old days but from sin and death for all time.

But he learned from Benedict that Jesus’ being God’s chosen one meant that He is the one who in and of himself, and freely so, is from the Father, and He is the one who in the same way is totally for others and not for himself.

That means his being Christ is not a reward for his goodness but the reality of his eternal belonging to God and being for others. People often choose their friends, their subordinates, their leaders after testing, screening and discerning. People often choose who to serve. Jesus was, is and always will be begotten of the Father and poured out for many.

Having understood this, he resolved that he, baptized in the Name of the Blessed Trinity must keep making an effort to recognize that he, in turn, must draw life and love from his Lord and through him from his heavenly Father and the Holy Spirit rather than from any creature; that he must, like his Lord, live his life for others, not waste it on himself.

He longed to share his reflections with young ones, preoccupied as they are with the search for something or someone to belong to and for the answer to the question of where they should go. Every heart seeks the source of its life, every heart seeks its destiny, and if the heart sources its life in that which is not God or turns in on itself, refusing to give itself to others, it fails in its quest to be anyone’s. It fails to be like God’s own Christ.

The heart may deceive itself into drawing life from riches, honor, pleasures, disordered relationships, from the flesh, the world and even the Evil One. But these things do not care for the heart. God cares for the heart. God who is love says to the heart in its depths, “You are my chosen one. You are mine.”

The heart may build a fortress around itself out of vanity, power-lust and fear. But these things, all selfishness and all else that enslave are bound to be banished, and the heart that clings to these shuts itself out of God’s kingdom. Going out of oneself to serve others is an act of freedom, a journey with other souls on the path to heaven, a step toward communion which is characteristic of life everlasting. Hearts were made for one another. They have a claim to one another. They belong to one another.

A Eucharistic Congress is a gathering of the Church to testify to the Real Presence of the Christ in the Holy Eucharist. “Christ” and “Eucharist” are not just poetically compatible words. The Eucharist is Christ’s perpetuation of his coming from the Father to whom He belongs as Son and to mankind, whom He owns because He is Lord. The Most Blessed Sacrament is Jesus being himself, the Christ, so that adoring, receiving and proclaiming him, man may follow the only way to his Father and learn how to be Christ-like through loving-kindness to his fellow man.