With the passing last month of our late and beloved Holy Father, Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI, I can’t help but think of his personal love and devotion to Jesus in the Most Blessed Sacrament. 

 

He remarked that he could never imagine anything more incomprehensibly beautiful than the Sacred Liturgy, and therefore we must return to ponder it again and again because its beauty and meaning are inexhaustible. He certainly made honest on his promise. 

 

When Joseph Ratzinger was a student he had what he called, in his own words, “A Reading Experience.” In other words, he read Henri de Lubac’s “Catholicism,” and it changed the nature of how Ratzinger would experience the Sacred Liturgy. 

 

De Lubac writes that faith is not an exploration in thought. It is not a strict adherence to a set of deeply-held religious principles. Faith is not the seeking of the highest good which can be thought. Rather, faith is a type of encounter with the living God. 

 

He writes: in faith God seeks out man in his innermost being and from deep within man is constantly searching to be in relationship with the God who alone can fulfill him, offer him meaning, give him purpose, and ultimately allow him to fundamentally rest in His love. 

 

This would form the foundation of the Christian personalism which would underly all of Ratzingerian theology. 

 

Christianity is not a moral code, a set of doctrines. Christianity is not reducible to a philosophical system. Christianity is an experience that must be communicated in a living reality. 

 

For Ratzinger, the primary place of this experience of God seeking us and us seeking God is in the Eucharistic liturgy where Jesus comes to us more powerfully than in any other way. The Eucharistic celebration is an “I” seeking a “You” and vice versa. 

 

My encouragement this month is to take our cue from the brilliant and holy Pope Benedict XVI. When we go to Mass, before we begin, take a couple moments and pray this prayer: “O God, in this Mass, it is You Whom I seek. In this Mass I desire to find you. I desire to be found. Amen.” Adoro Te Devote!