70 Years of Communion

 

When I was a parish pastor and used to celebrate with my parishioners' their First Communions, I always tried to stress in my homily that this was their First Communion, that is, the first of hopefully many, the first of a lifetime of receiving Communion. Calculating Communions since my First Communion 70 years ago today, calculating Communion at least once each week, and often twice or more, for almost 30 years, and then, after entering religious life, virtually daily for the next 40 years, that comes to close to maybe 20,000 Communions over the course of these 70 varied and eventful years. That is a lot of Communions!

But that is also so much more than a collection or sequence of events - such as the use of the plural (Communions) might initially and somewhat simplistically suggest. Obviously, as a seven-year old First Communicant, my sense of the dynamic Church-generating power and force of the Eucharist was very limited at best and probably barely conscious in any case. In that respect, the trajectory of my personal life has overlapped with the wider Church's increasingly heightened sense of a dynamic eucharistic ecclesiology.

Already as a seven-year old, I understood (in some obviously limited and child-like way) that the Eucharist brought me into Communion with the Lord. A lifetime of "communions" would enable me better to appreciate how, according to the. time-honored dictum, "the Eucharist makes the Church," thus bringing me into a both wider and deeper interpersonal communion with both God and the world, in which, as Saint Augustine famously said we become what we receive. (Easter Sermon, 227).

Photo: My official First Communion photo, June 4 1955.