Listen to the new translation for the Prayer After Communion composed for the Third..

Michie

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...Sunday of Lent:

As we receive the pledge
of things yet hidden in heaven
and are nourished while still on earth
with the Bread that comes from on high,
we humbly entreat you, O Lord,
that what is being brought about in us in mystery
may come to true completion.
This is simply exquisite. It emphasizes that the Mass is both a foretaste of and, in some mysterious way, a participation in the heavenly banquet. That pledge which “we receive” is the Eucharist, and it is the Eucharist which unites heaven and earth. It nourishes us “while still on earth” and gives us a taste of “things yet hidden in heaven.” Cardinal Ratzinger, in The Spirit of the Liturgy describes the present time (that which is after the Resurrection but before the end of the world) as the proper time for liturgy, for it is the great “already, but not yet.” Only in such an era can something like a sacrament make sense. Only in such an era can “Bread that comes from on high” be an efficacious sign of heavenly realities.
In the same book, Ratzinger speaks of how the liturgy is anthropological.

It took me several readings to fully understand the Cardinal’s words. The explanation goes something like this. We know that our completion (our “final cause” or telos) is to be found in God’s presence, that is, in heaven. In other words, we will be most fully human when we are standing before God’s loving gave in glory with the angels and the saints.

Conversely, the souls of the damned are virtually inhuman, which is why even individual demons in the Gospel (though properly speaking these are fallen angels not fallen men) describe themselves in the plural: “We are Legion.” In hell, all individuality is lost, for the self is given over to sin. Said differently, sin consumes the person. Think here of the character of Gollum in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. The ring, symbolic of evil, has all but claimed the identity of the wretched creature, so much so that Gollum refers to himself in the plural, experiencing the utmost of personality crises. Rather than giving the self over to evil, we are to empty ourselves out for the summum bonum: God himself. The Gospel paradox is: in giving ourselves away to God, we subsequently find our true selves. This is because all fulfillment (all telos) is found in God. From God we have come, and to God we must return. The soul who gives himself to evil merely empties the self; absent is the promise and possibility of finding the self.

Continued- http://the-american-catholic.com/2011/03/26/the-prayer-after-communion-third-sunday-of-lent/