Our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist immediately before His Passion, to show us the connection that there is between this sacrament and the cross. When He instituted it He changed separately, and by two distinct actions, the bread into His Body and the wine into His Blood, to signify that He would pour out His Blood to the very last drop upon the altar of the cross.
When He gave His Body to His disciples, He said to them, "This is My Body, which is given for you;" and when He gave them His Blood, he said, "This is My Blood, which is shed for you, for the remission of sins."
He wished that His Body in the Holy Eucharist should preserve its character of victim, and His Blood that of a liquor poured out and applied to the soul in expiation of its sins. Finally, when He gave to His disciples the power of consecrating His Body and Blood, He commanded them to perform this action in memory of Him, that is to say, He commanded them always to remember that this sacrament is the memorial of His cruel and bloody death on the cross.
But, on the other hand, He wished also that this sacrament should be the indispensable and necessary food of our souls, in such a manner that we cannot possibly preserve or increase in our souls the life of grace except by this means.
What does all this mean, if not that He intended first that the memory of His cross and passion should ever remain engraven on the heart of His faithful followers; and in the second place, that they should renew this memory in themselves each time they received His Sacred Body; arid in the third place, that whenever they were nourished by His flesh, they should also be nourished by His cross, that they should incorporate themselves, as it were, with His cross, that they should burn with love for His glory, and that the increase of their spiritual life by the reception of the Holy Eucharist should be manifested by the increase of their ardour to embrace His cross. This was how the martyrs of the first ages of faith understood His words, when they prepared themselves for their frightful torments by receiving the Holy Eucharist; and then, strengthened by this sacred food, they boldly faced the tyrants and executioners.
Therefore, if we wish to communicate usefully, and to fulfill the intentions of Jesus Christ, let us communicate with the express desire that His adorable Body may produce in us the love of the cross, that is to say, the love of humiliations and sufferings, the desire of dying to ourselves, and of being sacrificed, as Jesus Christ was, to the good pleasure of God. Let us judge by our love of the cross of the fruit of our Communions. Let us not think they are good because we have enjoyed in them many consolations, but only because we come from them filled with a new courage to overcome ourselves, to wage war against our self-love, to suffer all the pains and sorrows which God may send us, and even to desire greater ones; let us think our Communions are good and fruitful when we learn there to seek God no longer for our own consolation, but to seek Him and love Him purely and for Himself alone, not to pay any attention to how He treats us, and to be as content and more content with His severity than with His sweetness. When our Communions produce these effects in us, then they are excellent; then they are in accordance with the designs of Jesus Christ; then they are glorious to God and profitable to ourselves. Let us not be alarmed when our Communions are dry and without devotion, and when God seems to give us nothing. If this is through no fault of our own, through no voluntary infidelity, let us take comfort: it is a sign that the Holy Eucharist is no longer for us the bread of the weak, but that it begins to become for us the bread of the strong. For as long as we require that the Holy Eucharist should be accompanied for us by a sensible fervour and devotion, we are weak; but when we communicate without thinking about ourselves at all, without troubling ourselves about sensible devotion, without desiring it, and seeing ourselves deprived of it without any regret, then we are becoming strong; then we are beginning to live with the true life of the Spirit; then our love for God begins to be purified, and to be no longer mixed with love for ourselves. Let us try to understand this, and let us try to practise it.
As the Body of Jesus Christ is a food, and a food intended to increase our spiritual strength, we have only to see in what spiritual strength consists to be able to judge of the good effect of our Communions. It is evident that all our spiritual strength ought to be employed against ourselves, against our own inclinations, against our natural aversions, against our cowardice, our inconstancy, our weakness, against the horror that we have of all that crosses us, of all that restrains us, of all that mortifies us, of all that humiliates us, against our own spirit and our own will, in short, against all in us that resists God and the destroying operations of His grace. If then we find that this strength increases in us every day after Communion, if we acquire more mastery over ourselves, if we are less delicate and sensitive, more generous in undertaking, more patient in suffering, more faithful to our good resolutions, more indifferent to the esteem or contempt of men, more obedient to all the impulses of Divine grace, more ready for all the sacrifices God asks of us, this is an infallible proof of the goodness of our Communions; and even if we do not so judge it of ourselves, as, in fact, it is not the intention of God that we should so judge of it, we must rely upon the judgment of our director, and by his advice we must go to Holy Communion as often as he thinks it right for us, although sometimes it may seem to us that we derive no profit from our Communions. The devil, who knows quite well how necessary frequent Communion is for interior souls, employs all his malignant ingenuity to deter them from it.
1st. He inspires them with a vague fear of making a sacrilegious Communion. I say a vague fear, because it rests on no foundation, and only exists in the imagination. Our conscience reproaches us with nothing in particular, we have not willfully failed in anything, and nevertheless we feel troubled and agitated, as if we were going to eat to our judgment and condemnation. We must pass boldly over this fear, and approach the Holy Table without paying any attention to it. The proof that it does not come from God, and consequently that we must despise it, is that almost always, as soon as we have communicated, we find ourselves in peace, and all our vain fears vanish.
2nd. He tries to make them believe that they derive no profit from their Communions, and he particularly makes use of this artifice when the soul, deprived of spiritual sweetness, feels no sensible devotion in communicating. The only way to resist this temptation is to hold fast to obedience, and to make a resolution to go to Holy Communion only for God's sake, and not for our own.
3rd. He suggests to them at the moment of their Communion the most horrible thoughts of impurity, of blasphemy, and of impiety; he inspires them with doubts of the Real Presence; he throws them into every kind of trouble and anxiety, so that they scarcely know what they are doing nor where they are. God even allows the devil to make dreadful impressions sometimes upon our senses, either by himself or by means of our imagination. All the masters of the spiritual life, without exception, have decided that we must despise these bad thoughts, and take no notice of them, and that they are rather a reason for communicating more frequently than for abstaining from doing so; for it is quite evident that they are only temptations, having for their object to drive us away from the Holy Table; and consequently we ought to resist them and overcome them by approaching more frequently; for if we give way to them, the devil will have gained just what he wished for.
"But," you may say, "supposing I do make a bad Communion?" I reply that it is not for you to be the judge of that, and that you have no occasion to fear making a bad Communion if you go in obedience to a wise director who knows all that passes in your soul; that if you hold back from Holy Communion every time that the devil makes you believe you are going to communicate badly, he will at last succeed in his aim, which is to prevent you from communicating at all, and so to deprive you of the strength you need so much to support you. Thus, instead of advancing, you will fall back; and if you once give up Holy Communion, you will soon give up all the rest.
Since the effect of Holy Communion is to fasten us to the cross, and to help us to die there, it follows that our dispositions in communicating, and the effects which it produces in us, are always relative and in proportion to the different states of death to ourselves in which we are found; because Holy Communion always operates according to our actual dispositions, and its object is always to lead us on in advance of our present state. Thus it is sometimes accompanied with great sweetness and consolation, sometimes it leaves us cold and insensible, sometimes it crucifies us, sometimes it seems to be dead and null, so to speak, in its apparent effects. It is our director who must judge of all this for us; and the safe rule is that a Communion is as it ought to be when it is of the same kind as the state in which the soul actually finds itself. In short, as our state of prayer changes as we advance in the way of perfection, so does our state at Holy Communion change in like manner. It is at first active the soul can produce acts before and after; but at last it becomes passive the soul does not act at this time; it is Jesus Christ alone Who acts in her, according to the degree of perfection she has then attained.
- taken from Manual for Interior Souls, by Father Jean Nicolas Grou