There are three ingredients in the recipe for a spiritual communion:
1. Faith that Jesus is present in the Blessed Sacrament.
2. Loving desire to be united with him.
3. Prayer that Jesus will unite you with him.
A good prayer of spiritual communion will lead you through these things. My favorite is Saint Alphonsus’s prayer: it’s short and to the point.
But recipes don’t always include some of the most important things. For instance, I’ve never seen a recipe tell me to buy an oven, nor to check that sugar dissolves in water. Yet, without those things, most recipes just wouldn’t work. Similarly, this recipe for a spiritual communion leaves out something big, something that is much more essential.
What makes a spiritual communion work? It is Jesus’s desire to be united with you. At the time when he first gave us the Eucharist, at the Last Supper, “when the hour was come, he sat down, and the twelve apostles with him. And he said unto them, ‘With desire I have desired to eat this passover with you before I suffer’” (Luke 22:14-15). This is a strange, but very scriptural way of speaking: the repetition shows how intense, how earnest his desire is.
Jesus’s desire to be united with us is the reason he came into the world (to bring back the lost sheep, you remember). Jesus’s desire to be united with us is the reason that he calls men and women to Baptism. And Jesus’s desire to be united with us is the reason that he gave us the Eucharist and laid down his life. In these ways, Jesus reveals the desire of the Father’s heart, and he establishes the ordinary ways for that desire to be fulfilled.
In this season of distress, the ordinary way to receive Jesus is barred to many of us. But Jesus’s desire has not weakened in the least! If the shepherd does not find his lost sheep in the ordinary places, he looks in the strange and distant ones. Be sure that in this extraordinary time, he is offering extraordinary graces, gifts of his invisible presence in your heart. And that grace, in this extraordinary time, works just as it does in more ordinary times. This means that he really unites you to himself and to his whole Church. And it means that to receive a spiritual communion fruitfully, it’s important to be in a state of grace, just like for a sacramental communion.
Nothing replaces the Mass. Nothing replaces the Eucharist. But Jesus is still working in the Church, offering his heart and his desire for you in all the Masses being celebrated. And he knows how to find you. Believe in his love! Pray for that spiritual communion, and he will give it—because he desires with desire.
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Photo by Will Bolding on Unsplash
