About the name changing of Holy Communion

Throughout my life as a practicing Catholic, I have spoken of 'going to church' as 'going to Mass' but in recent years we frequently hear it referred to as 'The Eucharist.' It has been explained many times that this is the Greek word for thanksgiving but the Mass is much more than thanksgiving. surely.

More specifically, it is Holy Communion, as many of us have always known it, that is now termed The Eucharist. To me, the term Holy Communion is the nearest expression of the miracle and wonder of receiving the life of Jesus within us.

Jesus is the 'Holy One' as we say in the Gloria, he is in communion with us and we with him. What could be more precious than that and what expresses it more closely than Holy Communion? And as we adore him when he is held aloft before our very eyes, what expresses his presence more closely than The Blessed Sacrament, the outward sign of the inner divinity of God?

For me, nothing.

About sitting in a different place in church

One morning, at the funeral of a very respected parishioner, I found myself having to sit on the back row of the right-hand side of the very full church whereas we generally sit on the third or fourth row of that same side.

Now please don't take this the wrong way. It isn't that we have an invisible nameplate on 'our' bench. If someone else should be occupying it when we arrive, we just accommodate ourselves happily elsewhere.

However, it is a recognisable fact that most regular church-goers tend to sit in the same place each week. Perhaps it is just human nature. As I viewed our church from this different perspective, I became aware of, or rather 'saw' everything in the church in a way that I wouldn't have done from my usual position.

I think it just brought into my mind a recognition that so much of what we do in everyday life is done on auto-pilot and perhaps it's a good idea to sometimes  'sit somewhere else,' figuratively speaking, just to see what we may have lost sight of.

About Jesus after the Resurrection

Why could it be, do we think, that Jesus only appeared to his friends after the Resurrection? He could have chosen to go straight to heaven to be reunited within the Trinity but no, he chose to stay with his friends, to comfort and reassure and then, to encourage and strengthen them for the task ahead.

He could have appeared to non-believers who might (and only might) have thought that, as he had died, and was now alive, they should believe in him. Those who hated him might have tried to kill him again and found out that he was now immortal, and had no choice but to believe in him!

No - they had had their chance, freely - without tricks or magic - to accept Jesus for who he was. For Jesus, his mother and his beloved disciples, those forty days must have been a time of utter peace and joy, a union of love.