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 nouris...