This Sunday we celebrate the joyous occasion of some of our parish children receiving their First Eucharist and Christ’s Real Presence in the Sacrament. Our readings for this week help illuminate the nature of this Christ we encounter and our relationship to him. As someone who went through the RCIA program last year, I can certainly relate to any feelings of anticipation and excitement at being able to fully participate in the Mass and this special kind of encounter.

The Second Reading is at once a description of God as love, an exhortation to love, and an invitation to participate in this divine life of love through the special grace of Our Lord. In the Gospel, Jesus models what this looks like by calling his disciples ‘friends’ rather than ‘servants’. Friends are those you are open and transparent with, who share your burdens, who celebrate with you in your joy and commiserate with you in your sorrow. I believe that these realities are, in a certain way, best understood by children.

I have had the privilege of assisting with preparing the children in our parish for the Eucharist and seeing their uncomplicated faith and how they treasure their family and friends. Unlike adults, they don’t have multiple different categories of relationships such as colleagues, acquaintances, and professional referees to name a few. There is nothing wrong with any of these per se, but we as adults perhaps lose the simplicity of having just the one category, ‘friend’. We may struggle to call many we encounter “friends” as sometimes we are too jaded by past experiences where our trust has been betrayed or we have betrayed the trust of others. But the divine life is ‘Love’, and Our Lord wills for us to love even when inconvenient or where there is no material benefit to doing so. The children amongst us often showcase this courageous way of seeing the good in others and extending genuine friendship to all without weighing the transactional value of the relationship first. Imagine what the world would be like if we, as adults, sought out genuine friendships first and foremost rather than only seeing people primarily as a means to our material advancement.

As I sat in the pews awaiting the day I would eventually receive the Eucharist, I often contemplated the Lord greeting us as old friends, desiring to share in our joys and tribulations. Let us pray for our children to know this friendship, and may the Eucharist we share deepen our love for God, and for one another.

~ Ashan Dias