A Tiki Cup, Oreos, and Priesthood
A Tiki cup filled to the brim with fruit punch and a plate of Oreos. As a nine-year-old playing Mass, these were my humble offerings to the living God. Twenty years later, on the eve of my ordination to the priesthood, I am preparing to receive what childhood faith and devotion could only imitate and anticipate: a golden chalice filled with wine and a paten of unleavened bread.
Tomorrow the Church, through Her minister the Cardinal Archbishop of Washington, will place the offerings that Christ chose to be signs of his perfect sacrifice in my hands and will say the following prayer:
Receive the oblation of the holy people to be offered to God.
Understand what you do, imitate what you celebrate,
and conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross.
Only minutes after having been ordained a priest of Jesus Christ, I will kneel before the bishop and through these words he will tell me what I am to do and how I am to live:
Receive the oblation of the holy people to be offered to God.
I am to receive bread and wine from the Christian people and offer them to God that they may become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. I will take these physical offerings in my consecrated hands, speak Christ’s words in Christ’s person and make Christ present on the altar under the sacramental signs of bread and wine.
I will not only receive bread and wine from the Christian people. I will receive the Christian people themselves. The Christian people are also the oblation, the sacrifice, that I am to gather, receive, and offer to God. I will ask them to lift up their hearts with me—to offer up the whole of their lives to the Father through Christ in the Holy Spirit so that we might be transformed more and more into the Mystical Body of which Christ is the Head and we are His members.
Understand what you do, imitate what you celebrate,
and conform your life to the mystery of the Lord’s cross.
Beginning tomorrow on the altar of St. Dominic Church in Southwest D.C. until my last Mass, whenever and wherever that may be, I will offer the one perfect sacrifice of Christ to the Father—the sacrifice that the Son of God took flesh to offer on our behalf so that united with his suffering, death, and resurrection, we might die to sin, conquer death, and live, body and soul, with God forever.
Beginning tomorrow, I will start to die as one configured to Christ the High Priest, that is, to offer the sacrifice of my life out of obedient love for the Father and for the reconciliation of souls. Christ crucified will become the only measure of my priestly success.
The words that will be spoken to me tomorrow as the chalice and paten are placed into my hands, each holding the simple offerings given to us by the Lord, will communicate not only what I am to do and how I am to live, but who I am to be.
May God who has begun the good work within us, bring it to completion.
Photo by Jeffrey Bruno (used with permission)