June 2... Celebration of CORPUS CHRISTI...contd

The word progress has acquired an almost magical ring. Yet we know, at the same time, that progress can be a meaningful term only if we know where we want to go. Mere movement in itself is not progress. It can just as well represent a rapid descent into theabyss. So if there is to be progress, we must ask how to measure it and what we are aiming at, certainly not merely an increase in material production. Corpus Christi expounds the meaning of history. It offers the measure, for our wandering through this world, of Jesus Christ, who became man, the eucharistic Lord who shows us the way. Not every problem, of course, is solved thereby. That justis not the way God goes about things. He gives us our freedom and our capacities so that we can make efforts, discover things, and struggle with things. But the basicyardstick has been laid down. Andwhenever we look to him as the measure and the goal of our path,then a criterion has been given that makes it possible to distinguish the right path from the wrong: walking with the Lord,as the sign and as the duty of this day. And finally there is kneeling before the Lord : adoration. Because he himself is present in the Eucharist, adoration has always been an essential part of it.Even if it was not developed in this form of a great feast until the Middle Ages, nonetheless it is not a change or a form of decadence; it is nothing essentially different, but merely the complete emergence of what was already there. For if the Lord gives himselfto us, then receiving him can only mean to bow before him, to glorify him, to adore him. And even today it is not contrary to thedignity and freedom and status ofman to bow his knee, to be obedient to him, to worship him and glorify him. For if we deny him, so as not to have to adore him, then what remains is merely the eternal necessity of physical material. Then we are truly bereft of freedom, a mere speck of dust that is flung around among the mill wheels of the universe and that vainly tries to persuade itself of having freedom. Only if he is the Creator is freedom the basis of all things; only then can we be free. And when our freedom bows before him, it is not abrogated but is at that moment truly accepted and rendered definitive. But today there is one additional thing. The One whom we adore—as I was saying—is not some distant power. He has himself knelt down before us to wash ourfeet. And that gives to our adoration the quality of being unforced, adoration in joy and in hope, because we are bowing down before him who himself bowed down, because we bow down to enter into a love that does not make slaves of us but transforms us. So let us ask the Lord that he may grant us to understand this and to rejoice in it and that this understanding andthis joy may spread out from this day far and wide into our country and our everyday life. The book, God Is Near Us: The Eucharist, the Heart of Life , may be purchased at Amazon.com