Every mass is an act of remembrance. “Do this in memory of me,” Jesus says at the Last Supper, and that’s what we do every Eucharist. We remember the One Who Died for Us once and for all, definitively, forever, and remember not just in the sense of calling to mind but in the sense of recalling so intensely, through grace, that the past becomes the present and Jesus is here, with us now, in the moment. As He always is.
“The believer,” Pope Francis says, “is essentially one who remembers.”
We are always forgetting. We forget all the good things that have happened, we forget all our manifold blessings, we forget who we really are and that we are infinitely loved and infinitely remembered. Every day there are small moments of grace—a word, a touch, a certain angle of light—but we doubt these moments and let them go. We forget them. We forget that all the many distractions fail to satisfy. We forget that all our accomplishments and awards are illusions.
We forget that grace is always pouring down.
“The believer,” Pope Francis says, “is essentially one who remembers.”
And so we come to mass: to remember. Do this in memory of me–in memory of the countless moments of the day–in memory of “the precious and very great promises” (2 Peter 1:2-7) that have been made and that are always being kept–the promise that we are all loved, that we all matter, and that nothing, not war or poverty or injustice or oppression, can separate us from Christ. From the Truth. From the Mystery. From Reality itself.