Bearing the Precious Blood

We need not go to Jerusalem, we need not have lived eighteen hundred years ago, to find the Precious Blood, and worship it.

[...] We actually worship it every day in the chalice at Mass. When the chalice is uplifted over the altar, the Blood of Jesus is there, whole and entire, glorified and full of the pulses of His true human life.

The Blood that once lay in the cave at Olivet, that curdled in the thongs and knots of  the scourges, that matted His hair, and soaked His garments,  that stained the crown of thorns and bedewed the Cross…;

that same Blood is living in the chalice, united to the Person of the Eternal Word, to be worshipped with the uttermost prostration of our bodies and our souls.

When the beams of the morning sun come in at the windows of the church, and fall for a moment into the uncovered chalice, and glance there as if among precious stones with a restless timid gleaming, and the priest sees it, and the light seems to vibrate into his own heart, quickening his faith and love, it is the Blood of God which is there, the very living Blood whose first fountains were in the Immaculate Heart of Mary.

When the Blessed Sacrament is laid upon your tongue, that moment and that act which the great angels of God look down upon with such surpassing awe, the Blood of Jesus is throbbing there in all its abounding life of glory.

It sheathes in the sacramental mystery that exceeding radiance which is lighting all heaven at that moment with a magnificence of splendour which exceeds the glowing of a million suns.

You do not feel the strong pulses of His immortal life. If you did, you could hardly live yourself. Sacred terror would undo your life.

But in that adorable Host is the whole of the Precious Blood, the Blood of Gethsemane, Jerusalem, and Calvary, the Blood of the Passion, of the Resurrection, and of the Ascension, the Blood shed and re-assumed.

As Mary bore that Precious Blood within herself of old, so do you bear it now.

It is in His Heart and veins, within the temple of His Body, as it was when He lay those nine months in her ever-blessed womb.

[...] The whole of the Precious Blood is in the chalice and in the Host. It is not part: it is the whole. We may well tremble to think what sanctuaries we are, when the Blessed Sacrament is within us.

Frederick William Faber (1814—1863): The Precious Blood, pp. 23-34.

Holy card:  TEXT: Source of life, delicious beverage, you give immortality. 

Holy card source Hat Tip: http://preciousbloodofjesus.blogspot.com/ 7/6/11