You’d Better Come Quietly – Three Sketches, Some Outlines And Additional Notes

“ Father, in order to be a priest you have to know a lot about bread, don’t you, I mean if bread becomes the Blessed Sacrament?”

“Come to think of it, Barbara, you really do. You have to know a lot about bread if you’re a priest. Not about preparing it, or mixing the flour, or baking it. That can be left to the nice Sisters who have charge of the hosts which are to be used in the Holy Sacrifice. But about bread as a thing, about what it is and what it can become when Our Lord asks it to, you really have to know a lot. And, by the way, I like you, Barbara, because you ask such sensible questions.”

“I ought to be sensible, I’m nine years old, going on ten.”

“Yes, and I find more joy in discussing the Blessed Sacrament with you than with almost any person I know.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But, Father?”

“Yes?”

“In the Mass, where does the bread go when you say ‘This is My Body ’? ”

“Where does it go? It doesn’t go any place. It just ceases to be. It just vanishes. It just drops out of existence, not by becoming nothing, which we would call annihilation, but by becoming the Body of Our Lord.”

“Doesn’t it mind it, I mean, having to drop out of existence?”

“No, it doesn’t really mind. Because, you see, it can’t really mind anything, because it hasn’t got a mind. It never knows what happens to it, because it doesn’t know anything. But if it did know what was happening to it, it would be delighted.”

“Would it?”

“Of course.”

“Why?”

“Because there isn’t anything it could do, is there, that would please it more than to give God its color, its shape, its taste, all its delicate little structure, to be used for the vesture of His most beautiful Body?”

“No. But do you think it would want to do that for anybody else?”

“Of course not. The only one it would ever want to obey in such a way is God. If anybody else stood over it and said ‘This is a flower,’ ‘This is a stone,’ or ‘This is a bird,’ the little bread would simply laugh. It wouldn’t budge an inch. It wouldn’t pay the slightest attention. But when Our Lord, through the mouth of the priest, says, ‘This is My Body,’ the little bread just has to give up. It hasn’t got the strength to resist Our Lord’s orders. So it just vanishes out of existence, and leaves its little shadow there, in the form of shape, taste and size, for Our Lord to clothe His Sacred Body within the Blessed Sacrament.”

“Don’t you think it’s awfully nice of the little bread to do this for Our Lord?”

“Wonderfully nice. That’s why the priest always treats it with such reverence, even before it has succumbed to the words of Consecration. To begin with, the Sisters take wonderful care of it when they are making it. They bake it until it is so white and fine and precious that you couldn’t imagine anything more lovely in the way of bread than a little host is. Then when it is sent to the sacristy and is waiting to be taken to the altar, it always gets the most wonderful respect. It is kept in a little silver case, sometimes lined with gold. And at the Offertory of the Mass, when it is still only bread, the priest says the most beautiful prayers over it and tells the Eternal Father what an immaculate little host it is. And you know, if something happened to it after the Offertory, and it couldn’t be used for the Consecration, the priest would have to take very good care of it and never could let it be used for anything else.”

“Couldn’t he?”

“No siree! The priest would have to put it away in a sacred place where nobody could touch it.”

“But it wouldn’t have become Our Lord’s Body if it didn’t stay on the altar until the Consecration, would it?”

“No, it wouldn’t. But it would always be the little bread that was ready to become Our Lord’s Body, and was ready to give Him all its whiteness and littleness and roundness; and so, you see, you would always have to respect it for that, and you could never treat it like any other little bread again.”

“Did you ever see a host that was offered in the Offertory and then wasn’t consecrated into the Body of Our Lord?”

“Yes, I did, once. It was an awful pity. I had put it on the paten, and had offered it to the Eternal Father, and had told Him what a spotless little host it was, and then, when I looked at it closely, I found it was broken.”