Reflection 7: This Is My Body Given For You

Today we have some lovely words for reflection, specifically on the communion procession.

We are invited to experience the Psallite setting of "This Is My Body" published by Liturgical Press. 

Bernadette reflects:

These words are part of most Catholics’ identity, referring, as they do in the synoptic gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) to Jesus’s self giving at the Last Supper and in his passion. How do you give your body?

In the act of singing, we give our body. Song involves our voice, our muscles, our lungs and heart, our throat and mouth … To produce song, we give our bodies. Our ministry is embodied.

Your body is given for? For Christ’s body, the church, and through it and with it and in it, to Christ; and through him and with him and in him, to God.

Whose body is given? Whose blood is poured out? It is Christ’s and ours. Christ’s body is given for the life of the world. Christ’s blood is poured out for the life of the world. We are incorporated into his body by baptism, and we are more deeply incorporated into his body in each celebration of the Eucharist. Just how does that work?

And then we explore the purpose of the Communion Chant (Song)

The General Instruction of the Roman Missal says: “While the Priest is receiving the Sacrament, the Communion Chant [Song] is begun, its purpose being to express the spiritual union of the communicants by means of the unity of their voices, to show gladness of heart, and to bring out more clearly the ‘communitarian’ character of the procession to receive the Eucharist. The singing is prolonged for as long as the Sacrament is being administered to the faithful.” (General Instruction of the Roman Missal with Canadian Adaptation, 86.) 

The communion song becomes a kind of audible sacrament that lets us hear the unity that the Spirit forges as we share in Christ’s body and blood. We are made more deeply one. We can’t see that: we don’t get all “stick together” – but our voices sound together: the music makes us one and proclaims that we are one: “one bread, one body, one Lord of all, one cup of blessing that we bless. And we though many, through the earth, we are one body in this one Lord.” (“One Bread, One Body,” by John Foley © 1978.) This is why a solo piece or a piece for choir alone is not appropriate for communion: it is the whole assembly that is formed more deeply into Christ’s body, a unity that is made audible by all singing together.

For Reflection

Identify examples from your own life, your family, parish and community life, of “being given” and being “poured out.”