Timothy Menezes
Auxiliary Bishop of Birmingham
The Jubilee Year 2025 theme of Pilgrims of Hope seems to have captured the imagination, especially in our schools. There is also an appetite in many parishes for arranging a pilgrimage – at home or abroad – to mark this Holy Year.
Hope is a now wonderful theme and aspiration. But somehow I think the ‘hope’ in the theme Pilgrims of Hope is something that at worst keeps us from despair in life and at best gives us a spring in our step each day. It’s fine as a guide to keeping steady in this life, but when we consider the gift of the Eucharist, then we are immediately given something more than the limitations of
this life.
Maybe as a reference point, we can cast our minds back to the first time we received Holy Communion again following the 3 months or so that we were prevented from entering a church or attending Mass in Lent, Holy Week and Easter Day in 2020. What that moment of encounter with the Lord meant for us, how we were perhaps surprised by the experience and the realisation of that imposed Eucharistic fast.
So, to what extent can the Eucharist help us to understand the greater meaning of hope?
The words attributed to St Thomas Aquinas and associated with the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ lead us deeper into the mystery of hope as something rooted in our present sacramental life but more certainly an indication that its origins and the consequences of our celebrating it lie beyond this life:
This is something far beyond freedom from despair or a general feeling of contentment. The life of heaven offered to us in a supreme way in the sacrament of the Eucharist is a hope well beyond our own making.
In the celebration of the Eucharist during Mass we listen to the Word of God proclaimed and we are invited to the table of the Lord – both of which nourish us and offer us active hope.
In our encounters with the Lord outside of Mass, in worship of the Blessed Sacrament, we are called into the stillness and contemplation that can transport us beyond this vale of tears and draw us towards the hope of heaven not remote from our daily living but as a source of strength for it and beyond.
But if misunderstood, the Eucharist can be portrayed as taking us outside of our daily life and transported elsewhere. That is not the experience of most people.
I recall the words of a hymn which says:
So forget about yourself and concentrate on him and worship him.
God is rightly at the centre of our lives, but prayer is never about forgetting ourselves and concentrating on God.
The Mystery of the Incarnation is God dwelling among us, transforming human nature by sharing in it.
During this Jubilee Year where, by Scriptural tradition, debts are cancelled and those who are bound are set free, the hope given to us in the Eucharist can be traced through the experience of the Mass: a community of believers seeking forgiveness, listening to the word of God proclaimed, receiving within us the Bread of Life, and being sent out for our mission in the world, with renewed hope.
As we are called to be Pilgrims of Hope, we also need role models of those who have placed their trust in God: the people of Israel returning from slavery in Egypt and being fed
with manna from
heaven; every one
of those fed by Jesus throughout his earthly ministry and the despondent disciples on the road to Emmaus who recognised Jesus at the Breaking of the Bread.
Pilgrims of Hope are not, as we can see, those who are filled with hope from the start. In some cases, it can be quite the opposite. Hope emerges, a light dawns and overcomes the darkness of doubt, disappointment and despair. Our theme might be more accurately expressed as Pilgrims into Hope.
It is good for us all to recognise that in every Sunday congregation there are people who are desperate for signs of hope, those who come to experience hope, and those who radiate a hope which they already possess. The Eucharist is dynamic in that it has room for all of them.
Every Saint and holy person has known the experience of times where prayer seems dry and, for all of their efforts, does not always seem fruitful. It is good for us to remember always that no time given to prayer – whether at home or in church – is ever wasted. The measure of the usefulness of time given to God in prayer is for God rather than for us. Prayer is a lifelong conversation with God, so it is futile to assess prayer in respect of individual or daily encounters with the Lord.
For many of us, though, it should be a reasonable expectation that, witnessing the miracle of the Eucharist Sunday by Sunday, we are changed; that we are not the same people when we leave Mass as who arrive.
It should be obvious that we stand on the threshold of the meeting place between earth and heaven and are united with God’s Church everywhere on earth.
How can we fail to be changed? If it is not obvious then we must reclaim a hope which is a gift, a hope which does not disappoint, a hope which does not come from within ourselves.
May this Year of the Lord’s Favour, this Holy Year of Jubilee give us hope, give us the strength to be signs of hope, and lead us to see in the Eucharist something both ancient and new, in fact an encounter with the timelessness of God; an invitation to begin to experience in part in this life something that will be completed in the life to come:
A Mystery is a reality which we can never understand, nor even discover for ourselves. This mystery can never be solved. It can only be entered and explored by one who accepts with awe and reverence that the deepest reality is unimaginably greater than we can ever comprehend; that beyond the limitations of our senses, and even the horizon of death, lies a place of inexpressible joy, the fountain of all life and love. (Cardinal Basil Hume) ■
