Growing up in my Irish grandmother’s house, I got to experience a lot of her cooking over the years. She was a good cook but, being Irish recipes, while they were delicious, not too many of them had the real bang of, say, Italian cooking. I’ve always said that my grandmother’s recipe for tomato sauce was three gallons of water combined with two tablespoons of tomato paste. If she really wanted to spice things up, she would add a pinch of black pepper.
In reality, she was a great cook, making what many people today call “comfort food.” My favorite thing that my grandmother made was her bread pudding. When I was a kid, she taught me how to make it. I made it a few times but, in later years, I would just wait for her to make it because, to me, hers was better.
Sometime after my grandmother died back in 2000 at the age of 96, I realized that I didn’t have her recipe for bread pudding, and I didn’t remember how to make it. It seemed like the tradition was lost. Eventually, however, my mother found a copy of the recipe and I set out to make it one day.
As I was putting the ingredients together, I was brought back to the time when I was a kid, and she was teaching me how to make it. It seemed like she was right there in the kitchen with me and, that same feeling of closeness was there when I got to taste, once again, that great recipe. In a sense, my grandmother came alive to me in that bread pudding.
Today, we celebrate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ. Unlike my experience of my memory of my grandmother coming alive in the making of the bread pudding, the bread and the wine of the Eucharist becomes the actual Body and Blood of Jesus – the real Jesus – here with us in Body, soul, and Spirit. God comes to be with us.
The celebration of the Eucharist — the Mass — is the heart and soul of our faith; the Church teaches us that the Eucharist is the source and the summit of everything that we are about at Christians.[1] In the Mass, Jesus takes our gifts — our lives, our offerings of bread and wine — and changes them into His Body and Blood — food for our spiritual nourishment.
We are also changed. We become the living Body of Jesus whenever we share in His Word and His Body at Mass. In each of us, Jesus lives again. In the celebration of the Eucharist, we touch God and God touches us. Cherish this time at Mass with Jesus each week; it will change your life.+
[1] Catechism of the Catholic Church № 1324.
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