First Communion
This Sunday, thirty-eight children will be receiving Jesus in Holy Communion for the first time. Many of us will have happy memories of our own First Communion day. I still remember exactly where I sat on my First Communion day and that was over 65 years ago.
As a priest, I have been involved over many years with supporting catechists and parents in their crucial role of sharing their faith with the children. I well remember Sister Joan, a lovely catechist in my first parish, who always used to say that her aim in preparing children was, that when it came to their special day, they knew they had in some way encountered Jesus and were aware of God’s love for them. One cannot love the True Presence of Our Lord in the Blessed Sacraments if one does not know the man Jesus as a real person.
As the children come in procession at Communion time, to receive the host and say ‘Amen’ when the priest says ‘The Body of Christ,’ I am praying that for them this will be a new stage in their relationship of love with God. Their ‘Amen’ is their saying yes to God’s call to love and be loved. They now have the opportunity to love Jesus more deeply, to follow him more closely and to know him more intimately. May they slowly grow as people of prayer.
Ruth Burrow, in her book To Believe in Jesus says:
In the Mass, we have the deepest expression of what prayer is. Here God does everything. Here Jesus, his beloved, offers himself, the perfect offering of perfect love in which his Father delights. He delights in it because it gives him the supreme eagerly desired opportunity to lavish himself on man. The reward of Jesus’ surrender— and in what untold pain and darkness it was made and in what untold confidence and love—was God himself. Daily we have in our hands this perfect prayer as our very own.
Lord, we thank you for these young children on their First Communion day. As they say yes to what Jesus is doing and ‘Amen’ to his call for them to enter into his saving death, may they be given a deeper understanding of the beauty and importance of the Mass and see it as essential in their life. Amen.
