Let us flee to the Eucharist

One of the books I'm reading right now is The Seven Storey Mountain, the autobiography of Thomas Merton, and I stumbled across this passage the other day. It really made me think about how much of a difference it would make if I were to surround myself with religious symbols, with things that would point me to God when I saw them. In his description, Merton is talking about a small French town where he lived as a child, in which the layout and architecture of the whole city was constructed so that all roads led to the church, and no matter where you were in town you could see it. How amazing it would be if the Church was truly the centre of society again!

Oh, what a thing it is, to live in a place that is so constructed that you are forced, in spite of yourself, to be at least a virtual contemplative! Where all day long your eyes must turn, again and again, to the House that hides the Sacramental Christ!

I did not even know who Christ was, that He was God. I had not the faintest idea that there existed such a thing as the Blessed Sacrament. I thought churches were simply places where people got together and sang a few hymns. And yet now I tell you, you who are now what I once was, unbelievers, it is that Sacrament, and that alone, the Christ living in our midst, and sacrificed by us, and for us and with us, in the clean and perpetual Sacrifice, it is He alone Who holds our world together, and keeps us all from being poured headlong and immediately into the pit of our eternal destruction. And I tell you there is a power that goes forth from that Sacrament, a power of light and truth, even into the hearts of those who have heard nothing of Him and seem to be incapable of belief.

Amen and Amen!