family prayer | Sunday Mass | Lectio the Liturgy
Let's Lectio the Liturgy with the Prayer After Communion for the 14th Week in Ordinary Time. The closing prayer of the Mass this week reminds us of the incredible blessings available in the Mass — if we want them.
Grant, we pray, O Lord, that, having been replenished by such great gifts, we may gain the prize of salvation and never cease to praise you. Through Christ our Lord.
Have you ever considered that when we receive Holy Communion, we are replenished by great gifts? In the Latin form of the prayer, we find the word repleti (Lat.) which means to fill again. When we receive the Eucharist, we are filled with great gifts. The next time we go to Communion, we are filled again. The great gifts are the consecrated Bread and Wine of our Lord. It sounds wonderful, however, there is a catch. To be filled and to be replenished is our choice.
Toddlers are a fascinating age group of people. They know what they want and sometimes you cannot convince them to agree to want what you want. If it is 40 degrees outside and they don’t want to wear a coat, it takes some skill and bargaining to get them into their coat.
Unlike parents of toddlers, when we come to mass, God doesn’t try to convince us to accept His gifts. If we don’t receive them or if we don’t even want them, He lets us go without. The choice is ours. We can accept what God wants to give or we can reject it. We should not hesitate to give God our yes, however, because what He wants to give is the “prize of salvation.”
When translated from the Latin form of the prayer, the prize of salvation means “salvific gifts.” The salvific gifts become "great gifts" (muneribus in Latin) when we simply accept them.
In the prayer, we also ask that we never cease to praise Him. St. Augustine teaches us that praising God does not mean that we praise with our voice alone, we praise Him with our life. (Exposition on Psalm 148)
When I first learned about this teaching from St. Augustine, I had to take some time to think. There are many ways to praise God. We can talk to Him, we can sing to Him, but truly, the greatest way to praise God is to be the person He created each of us to be.
The choice is ours. We can be the obstinate toddler who won’t comply, or we can come to God with hands open to receive. It is also possible that someone may not know what God has to give us in the Mass because oftentimes, people don’t know what they don’t know. If that is the case, this is the plan: tell them about the goodness of God and live as if you have been given a great gift.