Liturgy and Lectio: Ego Sum Panis

Benedictus Antiphon for Lauds of the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever, alleluia.

A Sister shares her reflections:

This beautiful antiphon for the Benedictus at Lauds of Corpus Christi has always been one of my favorite liturgical chants.  The text is one of Our Lord’s seven “I am” statements in St. John’s Gospel.  In these statements, Jesus claims for Himself the Divine Name, and joins to it an image describing His role as Savior.  He challenges His hearers—challenges me—to faith in His Divinity, and to confident, loving reliance on His Sacred Humanity as the way to salvation; and He joins to each declaration a promise of eternal life for those who respond generously to this double invitation.  Living, real communion with Christ through divine faith and sacramental contact is the source of all Catholics’ spiritual life, whether they realize it consciously or not.  But the Dominican Order has always knowingly grounded its spirituality on these two means: contemplation of the mysteries of faith, and intense insertion into the liturgical, sacramental, apostolic life of Christ’s Body, the Church.  And the synthesis of all these mysteries and the summit of the Church’s life is the Holy Eucharist, Christ Himself.  Living in the monastery as Our Lady’s Guard of Honor, I have realized that our heritage as Dominican Nuns of the Perpetual Rosary gives us a secret passageway to the depths of the Eucharistic Heart of the God-Man: we approach Him, not merely with our own faltering faith and weak charity, but in and through Mary, whose faith and whose maternal closeness to the Sacred Humanity is unsurpassable.