This article is part of the series How to Live a Eucharistic Life by Dr. Brad Bursa. Read the earlier parts of the series: Part One, Faith and Part Two, Gift.
Like a branch shaken by the wind, her arm reached towards the basket, trembling. The fragment of the leaf of paper in her hand fell into the pile of other pieces, each with names or initials inscribed on them. Pools formed in the corners of her eyes, glistening in the candlelight.
As her outstretched arm began its recoil, she looked intently towards me with a look that seemed at once to be pained by a burden and simultaneously relieved of it. She was burdened by the act of relinquishing the very burden she’d been shouldering. After all, we do like to hold onto things. “Control” might be every fallen human being’s middle name. But she also seemed relieved because the burden was gone. Surrendered.
As she took a deep breath and returned her gaze to the altar that was being prepared for the sacrifice, I could not help but thinking about the ancient practice of sacrifice. I moved to the next pew with the weight of her prayer, her offering in my hands. The gravity pressed upon me as I collected more names of loved ones no longer practicing their Catholic faith. I watched as members of the faithful scribbled down initials and shuffled through the pew and over people to drop in the names of those who have drifted. They didn’t want to leave anyone behind.
When I reached the last pew, the other ushers and I carefully assembled the names from our baskets in a larger one, which was then processed up the center aisle behind the bread and the wine. This was our offering.
My previous post addressed the gift-nature of the Eucharist and, consequently, the gift-nature of the Christian life. Eucharistic living is one of self-giving. That has a nice ring to it.
The gift we have received in the Eucharist (Jesus himself!) transforms my life into a gift to be offered in love. This word—offering—connotes sacrifice: a gift offered to God for oneself or on behalf of others. Consequently, offering brings us into the heart of worship. In this essay, I want to deepen my previous reflection by exploring the manner in which giving God’s gifts back to him for his glory, in and through the Eucharist, constitutes the new and definitive worship central to Eucharistic life.
Sacrifices in the Old Testament centered on destruction. That which was precious to men and women had to be annihilated and fully removed from view or from use. In Jesus, however, we see that real sacrifice doesn’t have to do with destruction but with true surrender, ultimately total union with God. We see that worship doesn’t have to do with non-being or destruction, but with total belonging to God that becomes the new way of being.1 The Eucharist encapsulates this. The Eucharist is the new and definitive worship of God, given to us by God himself. In the Eucharist, God reveals how he wants to be worshipped. For this reason, Pope Benedict XVI says the celebration of the Eucharist “expresses at once both the origin and the fulfilment of the new and definitive worship of God.”2
In the celebration of Holy Mass, the redeeming sacrifice of Christ is “made present ever anew, sacramentally perpetuated, in every community which offers it at the hands of the consecrated minister.”3 At the same time it is a sacrificial meal, “the sacred banquet of communion with the Lord’s body and blood” (CCC, no. 1382). The sacrifice of the Mass re-presents Christ’s once-and-for-all sacrifice on the Cross. Mass makes present Christ’s sacrifice and invites believers to participate in it. As the Catechism puts it, “The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church's life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body which is the Church” (CCC, no. 1407).
The liturgical action of the Mass captures this participation in a concrete way during the Offertory as the gifts are presented and the altar is prepared. Far from being a kind of intermission between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist or a time to mentally “check out,” the Offertory is a critical moment—particularly for the lay faithful—as their own unique and individual offerings are collected (signified by the gifts collected and brought forward) and laid on the altar to be united with the offering of the priest, and through him, to the offering of Christ. At the Offertory, we enter a most sacred time to offer ourselves and our prayers fully to the Lord. As the altar is prepared and the gifts presented, we are invited to place our lives—all our needs and desires, indeed, our whole selves—upon the altar as a living sacrifice.
The Surrender Initiative drives this point home. At the beginning of this article, I described the Offertory at a recent Surrender Initiative Mass. Inspired by the Eucharistic Revival and the desire to provide some sort of direction to those spiritually suffering because their loved ones are no longer practicing their Catholic faith, The Surrender Initiative roots evangelization entirely in the Holy Mass. More specifically, I would argue the event centers on the Offertory, where we do not take up a monetary collection, but a collection of names—the names of loved ones are given to the priest, placed at the foot of the altar, and united with his sacrifice on the altar. The gravity of the moment is palpable, as members of the faithful make a heartfelt sacrifice. It is a real act of surrender by those who have encouraged loved ones to return and who are burdened by guilt, shame, or discouragement. Surrender is an apt name for this initiative, because, for those we love who are no longer practicing their Catholic faith, there is often little more we can do than surrender their lives into the hands of Jesus—who offers them, with himself, to the Father. And the Offertory captures the whole dynamism of this act of entrustment.
The Eucharistic sacrifice informs our worship, or better, it forms our sacrificial offering. And this act of total surrender to God is meant to spill out of the liturgy and into everyday life. Referencing Romans 12:1, Benedict XVI says Paul’s exhortation is “a concise description of how the Eucharist makes our whole life a spiritual worship pleasing to God: ‘I appeal to you therefore, my brothers, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.’”4 The new Eucharistic worship transforms every part of one’s life. As Benedict XVI says:
Christians, in all their actions, are called to offer true worship to God. Here the intrinsically eucharistic nature of Christian life begins to take shape. The Eucharist, since it embraces the concrete, everyday existence of the believer, makes possible, day by day, the progressive transfiguration of all those called by grace to reflect the image of the Son of God (cf. Rom 8:29ff.). There is nothing authentically human – our thoughts and affections, our words and deeds – that does not find in the sacrament of the Eucharist the form it needs to be lived to the full. …Worship pleasing to God thus becomes a new way of living our whole life, each particular moment of which is lifted up, since it is lived as part of a relationship with Christ and as an offering to God.5
This means everything can be offered to God. There is no part of our lives, no part of our days that cannot be offered to God—surrendered to him for his glory. Indeed, the “Eucharist itself commits us, in our daily lives, to doing everything for God's glory” because the Eucharist conforms our lives to Christ’s, and giving the Father glory is simply what Christ does.6 Benedict XVI notes that the world is the field in which God plants his children, the good seed of the Christian laity, where, by virtue of Baptism and Confirmation, and strengthened by the Eucharist, they “live out the radical newness brought by Christ wherever they find themselves.”7
To close, I would like to make three observations about worship in the everyday. First, Ven. Madeleine Delbrêl, a twentieth-century French laywoman and forerunner of Vatican II’s universal call to holiness, provides a striking depiction of what complete surrender to Christ looks like. She holds that this union results in Christ living through us:
Lord, Lord, at least let this rind that covers me not be a barrier to you. Pass through. My eyes, my hands, my mouth are yours. This woman so sad before me: here is my mouth so that you can smile at her. This child is almost gray, he is so pale: here are my eyes so that you can look upon him. This man so tired, so very tired, here is my whole body so that you can give him my seat, and my voice so that you can say very gently to him: “Sit down.” This boy, so smug, so foolish, so tough, here is my heart for you to love him with, harder than he has ever been loved.
In this case, Madeleine focuses our attention on the senses. All of the senses can be offered to God for his action to take hold in the everyday, ordinariness of life.
Next, the Church’s treasury of prayers contains the Morning Offering, a way of putting first things first. It acknowledges right off the bat that this day is a gift—one worth living well and offering back to the Giver of every good and perfect gift. It’s not something I make for myself. It’s not something I should waste or kill. It’s not something I ought to willy-nilly lose track of. It’s a gift to be received, lived, and returned as an offering. There are numerous Morning Offerings to draw from, but let’s briefly look at one composed in 1844 by Fr. François-Xavier Gautrelet, founder of the Pope’s Worldwide Prayer Network (originally the Apostleship of Prayer):
O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary, I offer you my prayers, works, joys, and sufferings of this day for all the intentions of your Sacred Heart, in union with the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass throughout the world, for the salvation of souls, the reparation of sins, the reunion of all Christians, and in particular for the intentions of the Holy Father this month. Amen.
The Morning Offering bumps into the third, and final, point I wanted to make. Did you note Gautrelet’s point about suffering? Yes. Even our sufferings can be offered to the God who has redeemed suffering by his own. Christ transforms suffering from meaningless to meaningful. Now, our sufferings, big or small, can be united with his as a necessary participation in the suffering of Christ (cf. Col 1:24). So that line that can seem so trite and annoying—“offer it up”—contains great wisdom. However, and we see this in the liturgy, it might be more appropriate to say “offer it with.” Our offerings are united to Christ’s, to the one who is Emmanuel, God with us, at every Mass.
1. Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius, 2000), 28.
2. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 70.
3. John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, no. 12.
4. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 70.
5. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 71.
6. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 79.
7. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 79.
