2019

The Catholic Church has always taught that in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus—the whole Christ—is truly, really, and substantially present. This teaching is rooted in Scripture, taught by the Fathers and doctors of the Church, and reaffirmed by popes and ecumenical councils throughout Church history. This teaching is summarized in paragraphs 1373-81 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church. 

On the Monday between one Christmas and New Year’s Day, I had to work for part of the day to meet a few clients, tie up loose ends for the year, and do some preparation for the New Year. It was challenging to be pulled away from my family over the holidays, especially with my easily bored sons out of school during the break. I felt guilty, but I needed to be a good steward of my business and financial responsibilities and get some of my work done.  

I took my family out to dinner one evening after my younger son’s lacrosse practice. As we were catching up on each other’s day and making plans for the coming weekend, I noticed a family had been seated at the table next to us. What struck me as odd was that the dad was on his phone answering an email, the mom was texting, and their teenage daughter was also texting—all at the same time!  

Human beings always faced the challenge of getting to know one another deeply. Today the difficulty seems especially great. We’re busy. We’re transient. Wanderlust or the need to move interrupts relationships. Distractions abound. Advances in computer technology enable frequent opportunities to “connect” but often screen out the body language and tone of voice which some experts say account for 50 to 80 percent of real communication. We hunger for deep relationships, but often try to build them on an anemic diet of texts and emails versus the richness of true face-to-face interaction.  

When God created man in His own image, He gave him a vocation in the same breath: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves upon the earth” (Gen 1:28).

We are awash in data, awash in claims for and against Christianity—and for and against any number of competing ideologies and lifestyles, ranging from Marxism, gender ideology, and radical feminism to health fads and fashion. One lifetime isn’t enough to weigh the merits of each of these; in the meantime, dialogue is often reduced to shouting slogans back and forth (a problem not limited to religious dialogue, to be sure). In the chaotic shopping-mall environment of modern media, the call to “follow Christ” or “repent and be baptized” or even “love God and your neighbor” must compete with “just do it” and “have it your way,” and with a million images that wordlessly present the modern gospel of sex, money, fame, and power.

How can Sunday be a special day, a different kind of day? How can we mark it as a day of rest and celebration in the Lord?

There is no simple formula for developing the essential Sabbath habits, given the differences in circumstances and state of life in which we find ourselves

We cannot simply achieve our vocation. We need to receive it, and this is why we need Christ, the Church, and, perhaps surprisingly, Sunday—the Sabbath. Sunday is a day of worship, rest, of celebration, of receptivity. It has been said that “More than the Jewish People have kept the Sabbath, the Sabbath has kept the Jews.” The same can be said for Christians. More than Christians keeping their Sunday obligation, the Lord’s Day has kept the Church.

All prayer is a raising of the heart to God, but every believer responds to God’s invitation differently, so this raising of the heart can be expressed in many ways. Christian Tradition has particularly recognized three primary expressions of prayer: vocal prayer, meditation, and contemplation (CCC 2699).