Tags
communion, Corpus Christi, Eucharist, mystery of faith, St. Thomas Aquinas, The Sophia Center for Spirituality

Today I am grateful for one of my high school teachers, Sister Thomas Aquinas. I wonder if she felt the weight or the privilege of the name she received as she entered the novitiate. Saint Thomas Aquinas is considered the greatest theologian of Christianity. I doubt that it was by inspiration that at a very young age, before any higher education, my Latin teacher was given his name, but she certainly deserved it. She was so skillful in her teaching at making the language come alive that many of us took four years of Latin because she was the teacher! It was a valuable facet of my education and added a devotional quotient to my faith as I still love singing Latin hymns like Pange lingua gloriosi. Call me crazy but even if I cannot now translate the text into English, the beauty of the Latin and of the music still lift me to a holy place.
Pange lingua* was a hymn composed by Saint Thomas Aquinas and celebrates today’s feast of Corpus Christi (The Body of Christ), known to us as the Eucharist. As many truths in Christianity, this feast is one shrouded in mystery. One way for us to speak of it is offered today by Sister Mary McGlone, CSJ who states: Those who wish to be nourished by Christ’s body and blood are called into communion with his lifestyle. Participation in his body and blood demands offering our lives as he did. (NCR, 6/13/20) For me, that is a way to enter into this day, this “mystery of faith,” that speaks to the life I need to live in the world of today, every day.
*Sing, my tongue, the Savior’s glory…”