What To Do With Your Hearts, Works, Joys and Sorrows Each Day

What a treasure trove of wisdom and spiritual insight our Church has accumulated over the centuries! The problem is that there are so many jewels, we forget what and where they are.

CANASTOTA, NY - How fortunate I was to stumble upon this gem - this Advice to Priests -  written more than four centuries ago by Giovanni Cardinal Bona (1609-1674):

When you take the paten with the host on it in your hands, put your heart there too, and the hearts of all those present and of all the faithful. Offer them to God so that just as the bread will soon become the body of Christ, your heart and the hearts of all the faithful will be transformed by loving and imitating that same Christ. You will be able to say: 'I am alive or rather, not I: it is Christ that lives in me' (Gal 2:20).

This is sound advice for us lay folk as well. Nothing prevents us from prayerfully offering Jesus our hearts, works, joys and sorrows each day at Mass when the priest, as alter Christus, lifts the paten in his sacred and venerable hands.

This is not a novel idea. Many make such offerings daily in the privacy of their homes or in their cars on the way to work. Why not join those prayers with those of the priest at Mass? A number of spiritual writers have made similar suggestions. 

This is a pretty simple thing to do - silently from your pew. It strikes me as a powerful and appropriate way for the laity to more "actively participate" in the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

What do you think?