Home Is Where The Heart Is: Weekly Message for 04-19-16

Dear Fellow Digital Pilgrim, pax Christi:

Yesterday, I left the U.S. to make the long and arduous trek half way around the world to visit my family in Australia. Having boarded my plane in San Francisco on Monday night and arriving in Australia on Wednesday morning, Tuesday April 19th literally vanishes in thin air as I fly across the International Date Line!

Spending 36 hours in transit is well worth the few weeks with my family each year. Intense joy is mixed with a tinge of sadness when it is time to say goodbye again, yet there is profound sweetness in knowing God’s fidelity and his promise to take care of my loved ones as I follow his call. Such is the missionary life! My consecrated sisters, my brother Legionary priests, and fellow members of Regnum Christi form part of my spiritual family in Christ as we seek to fulfill his mission of forming apostles.

Pope Francis describes the beautiful gift of our family ties within the universal Church:

“Wherever we go, even to the smallest parish in the most remote corner of this earth, there is the one Church. We are at home, we are in the family, we are among brothers and sisters. And this is a great gift of God! The Church is one for us all. There is not one Church for Europeans, one for Africans, one for Americans, one for Asians, one for those who live in Oceania. No, she is one and the same everywhere. It is like being in a family: some of its members may be far away, scattered across the world, but the deep bonds that unite all the members of a family stay solid however great the distance.” Pope Francis (9/25/13)

My own father developed the habit of ending our long distance phone calls by saying, “I’ll see you at Sunday Mass, darling.” He knew in a profound and simple way the power of the Eucharist to unite us all in Christ. Pope Francis describes the Eucharist as the unifying force for all families that extends God’s loving hospitality to every person:

“The Eucharist and the families it nourishes can overcome closure and build bridges of acceptance and charity. Yes, the Eucharist of a Church of families, capable of restoring to the community the effective leaven of conviviality and mutual hospitality, is a school of human inclusion that does not fear confrontation! . . . Let us look to the mystery of the Eucharistic Banquet. The Lord breaks his Body and pours out his Blood for all. Truly no division can withstand this Sacrifice of communion; only the attitude of falsehood, of complicity with the evil one can exclude one from it. No other indefensible gap can withstand the power of this broken Bread and this shed Blood, the Sacrament of the One Body of the Lord. The living and vital covenant of Christian families, which precedes, supports and embraces in the dynamism of its hospitality the toil and joy every day and cooperates with the grace of the Eucharist, which is able to create communion ever anew with its power which includes and saves. Precisely in this way the Christian family will show the breadth of its true horizon, which is the horizon of the Church, mother of all mankind, of all the abandoned and the excluded, in all peoples.” Pope Francis, Nov. 11, 2015.

As I embrace my family in a matter of hours, I will hear familiar voices exclaiming, “Welcome home, Lucy!” Yet I know with great consolation that home is wherever God is calling me. And as I give my whole life to Him, the desires of His heart become the desires of my heart. My home is in the heart of Jesus, who gives Himself in the Eucharist so He can dwell in me.

Thank you for being part of the RCSpirituality family as a digital missionary! I will be keeping you and your intentions especially in my prayers before Our Eucharistic Lord.

God bless you!


In Christ,


Lucy Honner
lucy@rcspirituality.org