March 11, 2025 // Perspective

Allow the Love of God to Flood Our Lives this Lent

Father Mark Hellinger

In the post-Communion prayer for the Second Sunday of Lent we pray: “As we receive these glorious mysteries, we make thanksgiving to you, O Lord, for allowing us while still on earth to be partakers even now of the things of heaven. Through Christ Our Lord.”

This prayer, which comes from the ancient Gelasian Sacramentary, draws us to the heart of the source and summit of the Christian life, the Mass, and how it feeds and forms us. This is particularly helpful to reflect on in this Lenten season as we draw ever closer to the renewed celebration of the Paschal Mystery at Easter.

In the context of the pilgrim journey of 40 days, we see the whole drama of salvation history itself play out. The 40 days being rooted in the 40 years of wandering that was given to the Israelites as a punishment for their doubt and then which was taken up by Christ Himself as He went out of the Promised Land and into the desert to be tempted for 40 days (which the faithful heard in last week’s Gospel). During the time of wandering, God sustains His people through many gifts, but the post-Communion prayer really draws us to one: the manna. The bread from heaven is the sustenance for God’s chosen people on their journey out of the land of slavery and sin into the promised land of freedom and life. So it is for us as Christians. The New Manna – the Eucharist – is given to us as food for the journey out of sin and into the promised land which is revealed in the fullness of time to be Christ Himself. The very body and blood of the Lord, as well as His eternal word proclaimed and heard, are the glorious mysteries received in this Sunday’s Mass (and every other Mass). For so great a gift, one act of thanksgiving is not even remotely enough. Yet, the Lord accepts our feeble attempt.

And yet, just as the manna gave way to a greater mystery, so also will the Eucharist itself. And that is what the second half of the prayer directs our hearts to pray about. What we partake of, what we participate in when we receive the Eucharist and participate at Mass, is not something rooted in this world but rather the divine life itself, mediated to us through sacred signs – sacred signs that will pass away when we come into the fullness of the reality they point to.

Father Mathias Scheeben summarizes this well when he says in his masterwork, “The Mysteries of Christianity”: “The fact that God has invited us to the sublime banquet in which we are given His divine substance enables us once again to understand why in the Eucharist He confers His human substance upon us. Partaking of the Eucharist is, let us repeat, but the figure and pledge of the promised enjoyment of the divinity. The Eucharist is, as it were, the milk in which the divine food is adapted to our present powers of reception; someday it will be given to us in all its greatness. … So long as this partaking of the divinity is confined to the sacramental medium and is conferred by it, the divine life thence arising is only inchoative and embryonic. But this same sacrament is at the same time a pledge and guarantee that the seed will someday flower into full beauty, that the logos will irradiate and transform us with the plenitude of His light, and that He will completely flood us through and refresh us with the torrents of His love and His life, so that in knowledge and love our lives will appear as the full expression and outpouring of divine life. Whoever can grasp the meaning of the statement that at present our soul is imperfectly nourished and refreshed with the fullness of the divinity, but that someday its hunger and thirst will be perfectly satisfied, will longer look upon the Eucharist repast as a wonder; for he will learn to regard it as the prelude and preparation for a still more marvelous banquet.”

Lent is the acceptable time of conversion. It is the season where we focus our efforts on clearing out the heart of the things that keep us from the Lord. In doing so, we make room for the divine life of God to enter us anew. To transform us and recreate us. We do so not with a vision that only sees the effects of this world but rather with the proper vision that sees this world as passing away. Our partaking of the mysteries that have been given to us as food and sustenance for the journey are meant to prepare our hearts to be worthy and ready for the fullness in eternity.

Father Mark Hellinger is parochial vicar of St. John the Baptist Catholic Church in Fort Wayne.