Light and silence – meditations on the Eucharist

La luce e il silenzio (Light and Silence), a collection of mediations on the Eucharist by Fr. Massimo Camisasca, is now available from Rubbettino publishing house. Below are excerpts from an article appearing in Osservatore Romano which explore the main themes of the book.

Adoration
Adoration is first and foremost a dialogue. A dialogue that God wants to establish with each one of us through the humanity of Christ. Jesus yearns for a relationship with us and our love for Him arises as a free response to His strong desire. He is thirsting for our response, waiting, desiring it. For this reason, He has decided to remain present in the history of mankind through a means as unique as the Eucharist. Corresponding to our humanity is not a matter of indifference to Him. Even in His glory He continues to thirst for a relationship with each one of us.
Before all else, adoration is the fundamental path by which our humanity, so distracted and superficial, begins to enter into Christ’s passion for us, for each one of us, for me.
The Mystery has assumed a face. In this way He becomes familiar to us, yet none of His profundity is lost, none of His extraordinary mysteriousness. It is a gaze which comes from the depths of life and directs itself towards our existence, like a wave coming from the bottom of the ocean to leave a gift on the beach. In the Eucharist the profound abyss of the Mystery surfaces.

The Eucharist

The Eucharist is God’s infinitely great mercy embodied in the infinitely small and ordinary bread and wine. A few years ago, on Holy Thursday, Fr. Giussani said: “God has come. He has come to stay with us forever, to stay with us every day until the end of the world.” (Excerpt from L. Giussani, Rito Perenne, 31st March 1988, typed conversation, Archives of Communion and Liberation).
“He is here,” Fr. Guissani said as well, “And so our life is different. Sense and sensibility have entered a new territory, they have stepped beyond the threshold of the Mystery.”
The Eucharist is not only a movement of the Mystery towards us. Through the change it brings about, the Eucharist sets the whole world in motion. It is the source of positive movement that carries people and things toward eternity. It is a wave of light that can pierce, warm, and burn even the most resistant. It is the greatest sign of the foolishness of Love: that folly which is shown forever, scandalously, on the Cross.
God needs man. He—who is the origin of communication, dialogue, reciprocity, and mutual, free dependence—has decided to be three Persons in one God. His need for us comes from the same source as His gratuitous gift: from the absolute freedom that is His love. He needs us because He could not keep His essential communion constrained. He could not resist making us part of Him.