| Written by Michael Swan, The Catholic Register,
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 Fr. Jim Profit offers the sacrifice of the Mass as a sacrament which connects us to God’s creation at the Jesuit farm in Guelph, Ont., June 1. (Photos by Michael Swan) You can’t be grateful — and Eucharist means thanksgiving — if you can’t name what it is you are grateful for. If we aren’t grateful for the land it is hard to know how we could be described as grateful at all. Gratitude that’s rooted in the land can teach us who Jesus is.
Christ was incarnate as the new Adam. He descended to the Earth in order to rise again, and become what He truly is. That means, He truly is of the Earth.
On the cold first day of June three dozen people — couples with their children, old friends, students working internships on the Jesuit farm — gathered in Guelph for a Sunday Mass that wandered all over 250 hectares of the Jesuit’s organic farm, woodlots, streams, hermitages and gardens.
This Sunday liturgy looked unlike the average parish Mass. But Mass is not a McDonald’s franchise, with the same bland, predictable outcome enforced by a faceless corporate head office. Mass is an encounter with Christ, whether at the parish or on the farm or around a rock on a hill near Jerusalem. It’s the same Christ everywhere and for all time, but each encounter is new so long as we bring to it new eyes and ears.
After the Liturgy of the Word and a homily from Fr. Bill Clarke, who emphasized how we have cursed ourselves and chosen death over life whenever we have separated ourselves from the land and lived without gratitude for all it gives to us, the tractors started up and the congregation was on the move. Using holy water and a cedar branch, the congregation blessed oats, potatoes, garlic, coyotes, trees, the future ecology centre of the Wellington Catholic District School Board, fields and streams. The congregation sang “Salvador mundi, Salva nos.”
The Eucharist was celebrated by Fr. Jim Profit who prayed for our resurrection in God’s new creation. He offered up the fruit of the Earth and the work of human hands. The congregation sang “How Great Thou Art.”
After Mass there was lunch.
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