Deacon reflects on eucharist

By James Buchok

WINNIPEG — There is one thing Catholics are doing right as far as what Jesus asks of us, says a deacon in the Archdiocese of St. Boniface, and that is to celebrate the eucharist “every Sunday since Jesus rose from the dead.”

Deacon Gilles Urquhart presented a day of prayer and reflection on Eucharist: A Place to Find Rest, for catechists in the Archdiocese of St. Boniface and Archdiocese of Winnipeg, June 8 at St. Charles Retreat Centre in west Winnipeg.

Urquhart was raised in the community of St. Norbert on the southern edge of Winnipeg and is a permanent deacon serving at Holy Cross Parish. He is a professed member of the Secular Institute Voluntas Dei and teaches at the Catholic School of Evangelization in St. Malo, Man. Since 2000 he has been the owner and operator of Stephanchew’s Church Goods in Winnipeg.

Urquhart said with the Sunday marking the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ on June 10 “the church reminds herself that we are eucharistic people and the eucharist is central to our faith.”

“Note that Jesus says at the Last Supper, ‘This is my body, this is my blood.’ It’s his very self, his personhood. It’s physical, it’s tangible, you can taste it. It’s something we can hold, we can grasp it. Christianity is summed up by God entering our human life. Our unique Christian understanding is that God became human in Jesus of Nazareth and Jesus continues to be present in the eucharist and in us. We receive the eucharist in order that we can bring that presence of Jesus Christ to the world.”

Urquhart said in the eucharist, “God physically embraces us and that’s what all of the sacraments are about. The most primal ritual of all is the physical embrace. It can say and do more than words can. All human beings need to be held. The eucharist is God’s embrace.”

“Sometimes when we’re praying by ourselves we ask, ‘Where is he?’ In the eucharist God gave us that tactile and physical expression of his love. Without that touch God is an idea, a philosophy. He must be touched. The liturgy has many words but what is most important is the touch.”

Uruquhart said for many Catholics the mass is not fulfilling “for one reason or another. It’s boring, it’s routine, but part of the reason for that is we forgot the nature of ritual. Ritual is intentionally routine and familiar.”

“The church asks three things of us at mass. It asks for full, active and conscious participation; we are supposed to wake up and then that ritual becomes more meaningful. The more I can enter into the nature of the rituals the more they can speak to me, the more we educate ourselves about the liturgy the more it can carry us. We’re not supposed to work on Sunday but mass is work, to be attentive, to be conscious of it. It is a ritual to sustain our lives.”

“In the eucharist we touch Jesus and Jesus comes to heal us, our wounds, our physical and psychological. Nobody ever touched Jesus and was left the same.”

“There are two transubstantiations in the mass,” Urquhart said. “There is the bread and wine and there is the transformation of each and every one of us.”