The next morning as the priest placed the Sacred Host on my tongue, I only felt the one single beautiful drop of Our Lord’s blood on my tongue. I held it there, breathless, and then felt it move slowly down my throat into my heart – into my heart. No, it seemed to take the place of my heart.
This love I had been missing all of these years, and yet Our Lord in His Mercy gave it all to me at once even if I came later. He paid me the same.
COMMENTARY:
In this grace, Dorothy received an experimental knowledge of two theological truths concerning the Most Blessed Sacrament. The first is that in receiving the Sacred Host, which is the Sign designating and containing Jesus’ body, we also receive His most precious blood. Under either Sacred Appearance of bread or of wine, we receive His body, blood, soul and divinity – in a word – the very Person of the God-Man: Jesus Christ. The second theological truth Dorothy experiences is that by the reception of Holy Communion we are really united with Jesus to become one with Him rather than Jesus becoming part of us. Ordinary food becomes part of the person who eats it, but “the living bread come down from heaven” (Jn 6:51) changes the one who eats it into Him-self to give that person everlasting life. In the last part of Dorothy’s description of this grace, she makes allusion to the parable of the laborers of the vineyard in Matthew 20:1-6. She gratefully admits that this gift of increased love she received at this time in her adult life is gratuitous on the Lord’s part, in no way due to any merit of her own.