Thoughts on The Eucharist

     Sometime in the late 1980s, I became an Extraordinary Minister of the Eucharist at OSF St. Francis.  This means I brought Holy Communion to the patients in the hospital.  We Catholics believe that during the Celebration of the Mass, bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.  And in the Tabernacle are kept, in the form of unleavened bread, the Body of Christ to be taken to those who are sick or dying.  This is called Viaticum - food for a journey.  So many times, instead of ministering to, I was the one who received a blessing.
      I continued doing this at OSF until a couple of years after Leah died and I was assigned to bring the Eucharist to a patient in the room where she had had her final stroke.  While saying the Our Father, tears welled up and I told Father Tom, the Chaplain, I just couldn't continue and he asked if I would consider doing the same at Methodist Medical Center.  I did until my knee surgery.  For a lot of years, I took Communion to shut-ins at St. Patricks Parish in Washington and recently began doing the same here in Peoria.  What a gift to be able to bring Our Lord to others.
      A few years back, while Vern and I were visiting our daughter, Lora in Wisconsin, she and her husband, Randy took us to the museum in Milwaukee to see items from the Vatican archives.  One display was of beautiful Chalices - the cup used by the priest during Mass that holds the wine.  Some of these were hundreds of years old and very beautiful with carvings and jewels.  The thought by many in the Church was that the more beautiful the cup, the more glory to God.
      In the center of a shelf, in the middle of all this magnificence, was a small stemmed glass and the lid from a tin can.  This was the Chalice and Paten - the plate used to hold the bread - of St. Maximillian Kolbe.  Maximillian Kolbe was a Polish priest who because he helped many Jewish people was sent to Auschwitz, where he was starved to death.  At the prison, the inmates were given unleavened bread to eat and some of the guards would clandestinely bring wine to him and he would say Mass and distribute Communion  to other Catholics imprisoned there.  Of all the Chalices I have seen, Maximillian Kolbe's simple glass and tin lid are what touched me the most.  It is not the vessel but what it contains.    And couldn't that be said of us:  it's not what we look like but what we are.
      By the way, the word Eucharist is from the Greek and means Thanksgiving