Peace be to you.

The subject of this lesson is the Mass.

It is a continuation of the Eucharist in the last lesson.

It must be understood at the beginning that the Eucharist may be considered either from the point of view of a sacrament

or from the point of view of a sacrifice.

In order to understand this distinction, because it is rather a technical one,

we go back to the analogy of nature.

Every day of your life, you partake of certain food,

the products of wheat, vegetables, fish, meat.

They all enter into the sustenance of your life. They nourish you, they feed you.

But have you ever thought of this other side? Before they can ever nourish you, they must be submitted to some kind of sacrifice.

Before they can be the sacrament of your physical life,

they must die or be sacrificed.

The vegetables must be torn up from the roots. Submitted to fire, the purification of waters.

Animals must be submitted to the knife.

Death, in other words, intervenes before you can live. Even nature, therefore, suggests,

that before you can have a sacrament, you must have a sacrifice. Before you can have communion,

you must have the sacrifice or the consecration.

Now, running through nature too is this other law that we live by what we slay.

After all, we slay to some extent the vegetables and certainly the animals.

And when we slay them and they submit themselves to our living, they are transformed into

our higher life.

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