How we can receive more from the Mass - 8 (nourished by the Word)

I have often joked that I can kill a plant at twenty paces just by looking at it – and I wasn’t exaggerating by much.  However, I have recently taken a little more interest in houseplants. 

It was a shaky start.  My plants looked great for a while, usually, but would then start to show worrying signs.  The most common problem was that leaves would begin to turn a kind of yellow, then brown, and then simply die.  And any further growth of the plant was stunted.  I thought maybe I was overwatering them, but that wasn’t the case. 

Eventually, after a long time, it dawned on me; I had ignored a basic necessity of all life – nourishment.  I wasn’t replacing the nutrients in the soil, the very food that a plant needs to flourish.  I wasn’t feeding my plants.

As Catholic Christians, our attendance at Mass is ‘obligatory’ not because God needs it – God needs nothing – but because we need it.  Our spiritual lives need to be nourished or they will wither and die, as surely as my houseplants withered and died.  And if our spiritual lives wither, then so do we; we become a shadow of what we were created to be and have the potential of being.  “I have come that you might have life, and have it to the full.”  (John 10:10)

In the Holy Mass, Christ is truly present and abundantly gives of himself.  This generous banquet is his food for us – we are nourished by his Word and Sacrament.  It is folly to think that we can flourish without either, as much as it is folly to believe that our bodies can flourish without a good diet.

We should nurture our spiritual lives, just as I learned that I need to nurture my plants.