The Real Presence in the Eucharist
By Fred Schaeffer, OFS
 

Someone told me recently that an alarming number of Church-going Catholics do not believe God is present in the Eucharist. That is a very depressing thought, particularly for those of us who do believe in the Real Presence, but greater than that is the insult to Jesus Christ, Himself. It seems to me, that people who pray a lot are people who believe, and those who do not pray are people who do not believe anymore. To me, the key to loving Jesus has always been prayer. We come back to the issue of friendship: In our relationship with Jesus, He is our Father, Brother, and, He is our friend. He is our friend because He loves us far more than anyone else does, and He does so even if we are the gravest sinners. If we are sinners, we are hurting Him: that is what He died for. Friends talk to one another. Friends very often love one another, and certainly we should love Jesus. Friends talk to one another, in a conversational way: so we should also talk to Jesus in a conversational way. He is with us all the time. Prayer is a conversation with God.

There is formal prayer, that is, prayer according to an established formula, something that has been documented and is in frequent use. Jesus, himself, gave us the Lord's Prayer. It is a most beautiful conversational prayer to Jesus. We see Jesus in each other. We see Him in people who are devout, friendly, joyful, but we also see Him in people who are suffering. So why is it, that there are those who do not believe in the Real Presence, do not see Jesus in Church, in the Tabernacle? He is a part of us, because He created us, and He created everything around us. Even though man created many of the appliances we use, let us not ever forget that God created us, and He gave us the brains and the technology to produce the items we use, so God is very much a part of all of what we do and all what we use. In Church, we ARE the Body of Christ, and "where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them." (Mt. 1 8:20), but even if there were fewer people present, He is still with us, because He is in the Tabernacle of every Church. He is with us in our families, at home, see Matthew 18:20. Jesus has given us the Our Father, his prayer to His Father. At the Annunciation, the Virgin Mary has given us the Hail Mary.

I could not imagine a day without celebrating the Eucharist, although sometimes one has no choice. People's working hours in their jobs sometimes precludes going to Church Monday through Friday. Jesus wants us to receive Him daily with a pure mind and heart. "Jesus dwells in us with the fullness of grace (Jn 1 : 14). Anyone who truly loves God and, especially, the Eucharist, understands how precious life in Christ is, particularly with Christ centered in our interior prayer life. 'Through Him, with Him, and In Him, "we do everything during the day. God watches over the tiniest insect, and He watches us, too. Every decision we make should be in consideration of our belief in the Eucharist, in Jesus Christ and His Father, and the love we constantly feel and experience.

It is easy to say, talk with Jesus in a conversational style, but it is yet another thing to do it. Some people do not easily do this - that sort of depends on how you view Jesus. Just as a soldier would not talk in a conversational tone to a general, many feel that they cannot talk to Jesus, and to His Heavenly Father in a conversational style because, they feel, it just wouldn't be right. Well, Jesus is our friend, above all else, and I think He would be honored if you talked to Him in a conversational tone because we are, after all, children in our relationship to Him. You could also use 'breath prayers' such as "Oh Jesus, I love you," or, "Jesus, let us do everything together today." Let us go fishing... Jesus asked His apostles to go fishing too, to become fishers of men. That is a call to discipleship, and aren't we all His disciples? His disciples, Mark, John, Luke, and Matthew, evangelized just as we are called to do. Evangelization is spreading God's Word. How do you do this? Let us think of some instances. Your neighbor and you share a hedge; there you have an opportunity to ask your neighbor if he heard that wonderful sermon by Father Joseph. Your neighbor tells you that he does not go to Church, then tell him a little about the homily. That is evangelization.

Let us take another "for instance.' I've lived in New York for a long time... and in a big city, you meet lots of people. Many go around with blinders on (as horses do) and never talk with anyone, never see anything, but you are an outgoing person and you are in the habit of saying Good Morning to the newsstand person where you get your morning paper; to the subway token-booth clerk, or the bus driver, and sometimes to a friendly person on the street who nearly bumps into you. If you see people regularly over a length of time, your "Hello," becomes a mini-conversation... and then soon, you talk about life... so you evangelize a little: weave it into your small-talk. Refer to God on purpose. You could say "God sure gave us beautiful weather today," or, "God have mercy on that poor guy who was robbed" (about a news headline). Mentioning God in a complimentary way often elicits counter comments - or at least a smile or a nod of assent - that is evangelizing also. If you share a little of your feelings, people share back. We are being disciples and fishers of people.

If you cannot celebrate Eucharist due to time constraints, you can do a few other things. You can dedicate your day to the Eucharist through prayer.

Fred Schaeffer, OFS
1998 rev. 4/24/2021

Saint Francis of Assisi excluded no one
A Reflection by Fred Schaeffer, OFS

People who are living now, are having a great struggle with the concept of accepting everyone as their equal. One of the most displaced and excluded people right now are the Catholic, and other Christian, Palestinians. Please pray for them, for healing.

Years ago, I visited a Leper Hospital in Louisiana. Although Leprosy is under control these days, still the patients feel like social outcasts. St. Francis would make a party of their gathering, and bid them welcome with his friars. Lepers were the social outcasts in Francis' day, but the strong attachment Francis showed to them and to all who are outcast and marginalized speaks for itself. We Franciscans have an obligation to freely mix with the outcasts of this day. (See Rule 13 below)

Rule 13 of the Secular Franciscan Order: “As the Father sees in every person the features of his Son, the firstborn of many brothers and sisters, so the Secular Franciscans with a gentle and courteous spirit accept all people as a gift of the Lord and an image of Christ. A sense of community will make them joyful and ready to place themselves on an equal basis with all people, especially with the lowly for whom they shall strive to create conditions of life worthy of people redeemed by Christ.”

The lepers of today are not just the homeless, but the sick, as well. As an only child, I experienced firsthand with my mother, in the early 1980's that when it became evident, she was suffering from Alzheimer's, all her friends left. They wanted no part of her.  Because she no longer fit into their social circle. She was excluded. It was shameful and very sad. But this is a common occurrence. Any illness having to do with the brain, for example Alzheimer's, and also people who are spastic or get seizures, they often are excluded from social groups. That's not right.

Refugees, and I've met many in my life, are excluded from the mainstream too. I've met people whose husband or wife lost their life in a concentration camp in World War II. Those who were fortunate to live, are the refugees. They abhor the country they lived in, because that's where all the pain was, and they feel often unwelcome anywhere else. I am abhorred by people who claim the Holocaust did not happen. I know it happened. I lost a great part of my family in those camps in Germany and Poland, so don't try to tell me the camps did not exist.

Be kind and charitable to all people you might meet. Show all people your best side instead of your worst. Be Christ to everyone you meet. May Jesus continue to bless you as you become richer in His Presence.

Fred Schaeffer, OFS
August 12, 2023

The four Great Dogmas of Mary

The Catholic Church believes four things about the Blessed Virgin Mary.

They are known as the Four Great Marian Dogmas. They are:

1. Her Immaculate Conception

2. Her perpetual virginity

3. Her Divine maternity

4. Her Assumption

1. The Immaculate Conception.

Joachim and Ann were an elderly couple with a home in Nazareth. But in their old age, God granted their prayers for a child. But unknown to them, and through no merit of their own, God preserved the child (Mary) from Original Sin. Original Sin is a human defect not intended by God, but incurred due to introduction of sin into the lives of humanity. Mary was not preserved from Original Sin for her own glory, but to be a perfect living temple for the coming of Jesus Christ. Since Joachim and Ann were elderly, they entrusted Mary to the Temple priests, where she was consecrated as a Temple Virgin. She remained in the Temple until she reached puberty, then she returned to Nazareth.

2. Perpetual Virginity.

The Gospels relay that Mary was a virgin when the Archangel Gabriel visited her to announce the conception and birth of Jesus. The Church has always held that Mary remained a virgin before, during and after the birth of Jesus. The Church also holds that Jesus was the only child of Mary. Finally, the Church holds that Joseph and Mary observed a celibate-chaste love throughout her marriage. The Gospels are not in opposition to this belief and when they refer to the “brothers of Jesus,” it should be noted that two possibilities exist. One is that Joseph had been a widower and he brought children from a previous spouse to the marriage to Mary. The other option is that the use of the word “brother” is used because the word “cousin” does not exist in Arameic. The belief that Mary remained a virgin indicates that she considered the Holy Spirit her true spouse. Some traditions indicate Joseph was older and “married” Mary, respecting that she had been consecrated to virginity as a child in the temple.

3. Divine Maternity.

This dogma refers to the belief of the indivisibility of Jesus’ divinity and humanity. Mary cannot be the mother of the human part of Jesus without being mother to his divinity, too. Again, like the Immaculate Conception, Mary is not meant to be glorified by the title, but this title expresses the foundational belief that the humanity of Jesus and the Divinity of Jesus constitute one existence and one person.

4. The Assumption.

At the end of Mary’s earthly life, tradition holds she returned with St. John from Ephesus where he presided over the Christians in Ephesus to Jerusalem. She stayed in a Christian compound that was part of the family home of St. Mark, where Jesus celebrated the Last Supper. The Apostles gathered around Mary and they were at prayer when Mary closed her eyes one last time trusting in God. The Risen Christ, Himself, appeared with St. Michael and Jesus received the soul of the Blessed Mother. The Apostles prepared the body of Mary for burial in the Garden of Gethsemane. After three days, Mary’s body was resurrected by Christ and both body and soul were assumed to heaven where Mary was crowned Queen of Heaven and Earth. This tradition demonstrates that, preserved from Original Sin, Mary’s body was spared from decay and it venerates the Blessed Mother for her fidelity by showing us the promise of the Resurrection for believers.

Assembled from the Internet

Fred Schaeffer, OFS

Pretending Nothing is Wrong

A Reflection by Fred Schaeffer, OFS

We are good at pretending there is nothing wrong in our soul. Yet, all except perhaps a (living) saint, will have been tempted by some form of evil today, and may have given in. Sin is a serious issue to which we commit on purpose. When we don't commit an evil act on purpose, or with purpose aforethought, as the law might put it, then we are not sinning. But this is an area which needs lots of honest self-examination.

That self-examination can be done, or is best done with the help of the Holy Spirit, in our inner consultations and conversations with Jesus. Unfortunately, due to the evil portrayed nightly on our televisions, rape, murder, theft, calumny, terror, etc., so often that we have become desensitized to this portrayal of evil, our thinking and inner peace is diverted to evil and we do not even realize it. Are we pretending nothing is wrong? God, I hope not. We must maintain a healthy understanding of what is good and what is evil so we may be able to differentiate when we are tempted.

I used to be utterly fascinated by watching surgeries, upon the human body, which used to be transmitted on television some years back. Open heart surgery is fascinating to look at and study, and it is, I suppose, less painful to do so on television, than in real life. And now we have a certain television series, where a medical examiner is plying his and her trade (two shows, actually) and one is treated to body parts, bloodied and usually dissected, and we are desensitized as we no longer regard these bloody things with real life. Similarly, those seeing fetuses after they have been aborted, often have lost total respect for human life, and that is very, very sad. We are pretending that nothing is wrong, but in reality, that fetus IS human, and is made in the image of God. The body parts, in the television series probably are animal parts or plastic. If these were human parts at one time, it would be a tragedy. Is Hollywood that insensitive? I don't know and I do not hope so.

Why do people like these stories? Because they portray actions presented for shock value, perhaps. Do these actions drive people to commit crimes sometime in their lives or make them capable of doing so? I do not know the definitive answer to that question, but the other day there was a report of an arrest of a 10-year old kid who allegedly murdered his mother with a single gunshot to the head. If this report is proven true, that is a sad, sad tragedy. I can only pray that our Lord have mercy on the soul of the accused, accused because the perpetrator hasn't had his day in court yet (At the time I first wrote this reflection).

Murder is not an uncommon crime, as is well known. However, it occurs every day in some parts of the world. The Sudan comes to mind, and we are asked to pray for the victims there, and really those committing these horrible deeds are victims too - victims of revolution and hatred. There are other nations in the world where people simply disappear when someone makes a unilateral decision to do away with them. We cannot pretend there is nothing wrong, but we are astonished there is so much evil.

The United States has the highest documented incarceration rate in the world. The U.S. incarceration rate on June 30, 2009 was 748 inmates per 100,000 U.S. residents, or 0.75%. The USA also has the highest total documented prison and jail population in the world. Furthermore, one in three released inmates get back into prison after a short interval. Those are terrible statistics ... someone is pretending nothing is wrong ... why? Because there is no attempt made, for the most part, at rehabilitating the incarcerated; convicted criminals are just caged, warehoused. And even that costs too much money... what can be done to turn this trend around? When people feel inclined to steal to make ends meet in this lousy economy, there is a lot wrong.

We cannot begin to deal with all the wrong in this world in others. We have to begin with ourselves. We have to begin to get back to this understanding what is evil and what is not. This can be done by inner conversion, by turned back to the Lord, and seeking help from a faith community. We cannot blame a church for its shortsightedness, its hypocrisy in denying sinful conditions, we must first begin at home. Ask Our Lord forgiveness, do not judge others (leave that to God); of course if you see wrongs committed against young people, that should be brought to the attention of proper authorities, but other than that, we really have to begin at home and we cannot pretend all is well with us. Incrementally we all share in the human condition, and we must take responsibility.

Our Lord Jesus Christ, in order to secure our Salvation, died for all of us on a Cross. This was no accident, it was foretold in the Old Testament. And it happened, and we can achieve eternal happiness, provided we do not mess things up further. I pray that all people who read these teachings and reflections will not pretend nothing is wrong, but will be active in the fight against evil. Remember, the eyes are the windows to the soul, so be careful what your eyes see, night after night after night.

May God bless you and keep you out of harms' way!

Fred Schaeffer, OFS

First written in 2012, republished 9/5/2023

The Mystic: St. Francis of Assisi

by Fred Schaeffer, OFS

What is a Mystic? Well, there are many definitions, none of which suit me. We could simply state that mysticism is the philosophy and practice of a direct experience of God. St. Francis had an innocence that is difficult to find in today’s world. By upbringing, not really a lover of the environment, he regarded every tree as an individual creation of God. As G.K. Chesterton says so well, "In a word, we talk about a man who cannot see the wood for the trees. St. Francis was a man who did not want to see the wood for the trees. He wanted to see each tree as a separate and almost a sacred thing, being a child of God and therefore a brother and sister of man."1

Francis' Canticle of the Creatures tells us a lot about his uniqueness as a mystic. Some call him an impossible dreamer, but make no mistake about this; he wasn’t a simpleton or a fool. He had a deep, innate Faith in God, honed to a finer point than most of us. According to Chesterton, “For St. Francis nothing was ever in the background. We might say that his mind had no background, except perhaps that divine darkness out of which the divine love had called up every colored creature one by one. He saw everything as dramatic, distinct from its setting, not all of a piece like a picture but in action like a play. A bird went by him like an arrow; something with a story and a purpose, though it was a purpose of life and not a purpose of death. “1

St. Francis was a mystic, but he believed in mysticism and not in mystification. As a mystic he was the mortal enemy of all those mystics who melt away the edges of things and dissolve an entity into an environment. He was a mystic of the daylight and the darkness; but not a mystic of the twilight. He was the very contrary of that sort of oriental visionary who is only a mystic because he is too much of a skeptic to be a materialist. St. Francis was emphatically a realist, using the world realist in its much more real medieval sense.

There are few people, of the modern world in the 21st Century, who are not materialists. There are even fewer people who are so pure of thought that they always have something good to say about other people. Most of us, today, suffer. We suffer because we cannot have what the other person has, and we suffer because of sickness. St. Francis was sick, too, but he knew his pain was the pain of the Cross, and he lived with Christ in a mystical relationship that made it easy to see why he is always pictured at the Cross, supporting Christ, and Vice-versa.

We need but to read The Little Flowers of Saint Francis, to find examples of Francis’s mysticism. St. Clare is also a great mystic. As were many great saints. St. John of the Cross, St. Teresa of Avila, and St. Therese of the Child Jesus, were mystics because of their pure and direct relationship with Jesus. Some of the elderly, retired friars, still live this simple direct relationship with Jesus. I pray that there are more of them.

Fred S. Schaeffer, OFS

Orig. 2015 in the Canticle; repub. 12/30/2023

(1) St. Francis of Assisi G.K. Chesterton, Image Book edition 1957, 1924, by George H. Doran Company.

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