Supporting homily on feast of Corpus Christi using words from Dom Gregory Dix's "Shape of the Liturgy" and St Francis of Assisi's Meditation on the Blessed Sacrament

1. Homily Fr. Simon Rundell SCP

3. Jesus is God

4. Mary is his Mother

5. Go to Mass

6. anamnesis

7. Let everyone be struck with fear, the whole world tremble, and the heavens exult when Christ, the Son of the living God, is present on the altar in the hands of a priest!

8. O wonderful loftiness and stupendous dignity! O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! The Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that He hides Himself for our salvation under an ordinary piece of bread!

9. See the humility of God, dear friends, and pour out your hearts before Him!

10. Humble yourselves that you may be exalted by Him!

11. Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He Who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally!

13. Men have found no better thing than this to do:

14. for kings at their crowning

15. for criminals going to the scaffold;

16. for armies in triumph

17. for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church;

18. for the proclamation of a dogma

19. for a good crop of wheat;

20. for the wisdom of the Parliament of a mighty nation

21. for a sick old woman afraid to die;

22. for a schoolboy sitting an examination

23. for Columbus setting out to discover America;

24. for the famine of whole provinces

25. for the soul of a dead lover;

26. in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia;

27. for a village headman much tempted to return to fetish because the yams had failed;

28. because the Turk was at the gates of Vienna;

29. for the repentance of Margaret;

30. for the settlement of a strike;

31. for a son for a barren woman;

32. for Captain so-and-so, wounded and prisoner-of-war;

33. while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheatre;

34. on the beach at Dunkirk;

35. while the hiss of scythes in the thick June grass came faintly through the windows of the church;

36. tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows;

37. furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near Murmansk;

38. gorgeously, for the canonisation of S. Joan of Arc

39. plebs sancta Dei the holy common people of God

41. Jesus is God.

42. Mary is his Mother

43. Go to Mass.

44. Amen.