ORDER OF PRAYERS 1: Night Prayers I/Office of Readings I
ORDER OF PRAYERS 2: Night Prayers II/Office of Readings II
ORDER OF PRAYERS 3: Office of Readings III/Morning Prayer I
ORDER OF PRAYERS 4: Office of Readings IV/Morning Prayer II
ORDER OF PRAYERS 5: Office of Readings V/Morning Prayer III
Introduction
Adoration
Thanksgiving
Reparation
Petition
Prayers for Deceased Members
Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament
Jesus Christ, The Bread of Life
by Saint Peter Julian Eymard
It is Jesus who called himself the bread of life! What an unusual name! An angel commissioned to name our Lord would have drawn a name in conformity with his attributes: the Word, Lord, etc. But bread? He would never have dared call his God thus. Bread of life, that is the real name of Jesus. It expresses Jesus Christ fully, in his life, in his death, and after his resurrection: on the cross, he will be ground and sifted like flour; after the resurrection, he will be for our souls what material bread is for our bodies; he will truly be our bread of life.
Now, material bread feeds and sustains life. We shall die unless we take food, the basis of which is bread. Bread is more essential to our bodies than all other foods; of itself it can sustain life.
The soul, physically speaking, has received from God a life which cannot die; it is immortal. But the life of grace — received in baptism, recovered and restored by the sacrament of penance — the life of holiness, a thousand times more noble than the natural life, is not sustained without nourishment; and its principal food is Jesus in the Eucharist. The life found anew in penance will be perfected by the Eucharist in a way which will purify us of our attachment to sin, will blot out our daily faults, will give us strength to remain faithful to our good resolutions, and will drive away from us occasions of sin.
Our Lord has said it: "He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives continually in me, and I in him. As I live because of the Father, the living Father who has sent me, so he who eats me will live, in his turn, because of me" (Jn 6:57, 58). Food, in fact, communicates its own substance to the one who takes it. Jesus will not change himself into us; he will change us into another himself.
But we do not eat only to keep alive. We eat to gather enough strength to do our work in life. To eat just enough to keep death away is hardly prudent and is not sufficient. The body must work, and when it works it must spend not its substance — for that would soon be fatal — but the reserves supplied by nourishment. It is a law: we do not give what we do not have. The man who must do heavy work and at night is not given enough food is losing his strength.
Now the closer we want to draw to God and the more we want to practice virtue, the more struggles we must expect. Consequently, we ought to store up more strength so as not to be overcome. Well, the Eucharist alone will supply you with the needed strength for all these struggles of the Christian life.
Come often to strengthen yourself at the holy table, from which you will receive a strong and fruitful life. May this life grow in you until God changes it into a life of eternal happiness!
