Fr. Roger J. Landry
Acton University 2015
June 17, 2015
Let us pray,
Heavenly Father,
We thank you for the gift of hunger, which opens us up every day in humility and gratitude to taste and see your goodness. With providential love you never cease to respond to our filial prayer to give us each day our daily bread. You fill the hungry with good things and this bodily hunger continually reminds us how to yearn for every word that comes from your mouth, how to hunger and thirst for righteousness, how to make doing your will our food and drink, how to look with compassion on our brothers and sisters who are under- or malnourished in body or soul, and most of all how to crave the eternal wedding feast.
Your Son, Jesus, made meals the setting for so much of his saving work. He unveiled his glory during a wedding banquet in Cana, embraced sinners at table in the houses of Matthew the Publican and Simon the Pharisee, deepened friendships in Bethany with Martha, Mary and Lazarus, showed your lavish generosity on hillsides by multiplying loaves and fish, anticipated and began the new and eternal Passover at table in the Upper Room, revealed Himself to the disciples in Emmaus through the Breaking of Bread, and over breakfast at a seashore taught the apostles as shepherds how to tend and feed your sheep and as fishers of men how to fill the nets to the breaking point.
Your Son wants the table to continue to be a sacred setting where, when two or more of us gather in his name, he joins us to continue his saving work. It’s here at table where, as we break bread, fruit of the earth and work of human hands, he seeks to make us companions, com-panis, joined as one bread, one body. It’s at table, as we share our lives with each other, that he seeks to bring about a true convivium modeled and pointing to the sharing of life to the full that will happen at the table in your eternal home.
Tonight as we come together hungry and grateful, with each other and with your Son, we thank you for the manifold ways you have already fed our minds, hearts, souls and bodies today. We thank you for Acton University and the generosity and hard work of so many who have made it possible. We thank you for the ways you have strengthened Fr. Robert Sirico, Kris Mauren, and so many others who have built Acton Institute over the last quarter century to carry on your work and to form and support so many with sleeves uprolled in your vineyards and fields. We ask you to bless our speaker, Dr. Greg Thornbury, as tonight he seeks to inspire us, as he famously does students at The Kings College, to go out enthusiastically as salt, light and leaven to make society more and more a College of your Kingdom. And we ask you to bless us and bless this food that we’re about to receive through Christ our Lord. Amen.