From my place here my look turns, almost instinctively, to the altar. The whole church is built because of the Presence of God in that tabernacle. Like the peasant at Ars, let me now look at Him and allow Him to look at me. Let me rest for even a few minutes on the overwhelming fact that He is there, only a few feet from where I am kneeling, as truly as when He walked up the streets of Jerusalem or Capharnaum. "Jesus Christ, yesterday, today, and the same forever." He is here to share the loneliness of my exile. In my hours of depression I am indeed blessed if I have learned to turn to Him.
A priest was conducting a Holy Hour, and, in the course of his sermon, he kept insisting on just this one fact: that Jesus Christ is really there, and remains there always in the tabernacle. Right under the pulpit a poor woman was sitting, with eyes glued on the priest and taking in the full import of his words. A few days later she received, most unexpectedly, a gift of two thousand dollars. She pressed it into the priest's hands, telling him to get a tabernacle with it that would not be altogether unworthy of the Real Presence.
Lord, I can offer You a tabernacle too, since You abide in our midst only in order to take up Your abode in our souls in Holy Communion. Lord, I am not worthy . . . Help me to realize the truth, even a little better. I believe, Lord; help my unbelief.
What a sense of solidarity comes to me as I kneel here in this remote corner and reflect on the unity of the Catholic Faith! Suppose I was to go into St. Peter's amid all the splendors of a Pontifical High Mass. What is the meaning of those costly vestments, of this blaze of lights, of the inspiring words and ceremonies? It is all our feeble attempt to demonstrate to the world our living faith in the Real Presence. In the midst of this brilliant setting the Father of all Christendom, bent it may be with age and care, comes to the altar to receive the embrace of the divine Strengthener, and, at the same moment, away in the heart of mission land, the young priest, surrounded only by a few hardly civilized natives, stands before the altar too to offer the same sacrifice.
To Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament come the little children in all the spotless innocence of their First Holy Communion Day, and to the sinner on his deathbed, who looks back with sorrow over a poor broken life, comes a sentence of pardon and the visit of Christ. Because Jesus is really present in the Blessed Eucharist men will melt down their gold and silver and raise to Him stately cathedrals in every land, but Jesus, nonetheless, does not disdain the humble village chapel or the roughhewn wooden shelter of some povertystricken mission field.
The world stands back and looks on in amazement at the triumphant march of the Blessed Sacrament in our Eucharistic Congresses, but it knows not that the same Christ is borne in obscurity through the crowded thoroughfare, hastening with His priest to the bedside of the sick or the dying.
Thus is our faith in the Real Presence written in large characters across the face of the world. From every quarter of the globe arise the voices of four hundred million Catholics, a mighty swelling chorus, composed of men of every diversity of race and clime, differing in customs, differing in degree of civilization, differing in color differing in gifts of mind and heart, but all welded together into one impregnable whole in their unwavering testimony: "We believe and do confess that Jesus Christ is present in the Holy Eucharist."
Jesus, give me the spirit of deep gratitude. Deign to bend Your ear to catch my note in that vast chorus. I believe, but I would that my faith were deeper.