The eucharistic life consists of taking what bread and wine we have -- the hours and minutes of each "ordinary" day, our labor and leisure, our friends and enemies, our successes and failures -- taking all these and all else that we are and have and placing them on the altar before God with a prayer of great thanksgiving:
We pray you, Gracious God, to send your Holy Spirit upon these your gifts that they, too, may be sacraments of the Body of Christ and his Blood of the new Covenant, uniting us to your Son in his sacrifice, that we may be acceptable through him, being sanctified by the Holy Spirit.
And, if this were not difficult enough, we must then accept that these gifts we bring -- the bodies we have presented as our reasonable worship -- now manifest the real presence of our crucified and risen Lord and that we go out into the world to do the work he has given us to do as living members of the body of Christ and heirs of his eternal kingdom. Alleluia.
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