If you do not eat of the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood, you have no life in you. –Jesus

We’re winding up five Sundays in a row focused on the Bread of Life discourse from John’s gospel.  When I returned to the Catholic Church twenty years ago after more than a dozen years away, this passage…  You’d have had to have been there.  This passage is deep beyond words, and to this day it confirms for me the singluar reason why I will never be anything besides Catholic.  Even if I’m a bad Catholic, which I am.

G. K. Chesterton once said that anything worth doing is worth doing badly.  I doubt he had me in mind, but it holds true for me.  Someone else once said that everyone was born for a reason, and some were born to serve as a warning to others.  I may well be that person, too.  But yet a third person, and I’ve quoted this person for years in my FB profile page, has said that it is never too late to start doing the right thing.

That is what keeps driving me when I have bad days.  It is really the heart and soul of the message of the Resurrection, and the hope the Church holds out for us in Baptism and Confession.  The grace bought for us on Calvary, which animates and enlivens us through the Sacraments, tells us that in simple and deeply loving words:  “My Jesus, Mercy” are the only three words spoken from the heart needed to turn the gaze of God upon us.  He will pour out mercy upon us.  He anticipated the need and made it available to us before the first of us had need to ask.  That mercy confers complete forgiveness, so much so that the man or woman retreating from the confessional bears a soul as bright and spotless as a newly baptized infant.

It is never too late to start doing the right thing.

Return yourself to the state of grace.  If you’re already there, stay there.  Eat His flesh, drink His blood, and with a loving heart, adore with me and sing “Alleluia.”