How Christ receives our weakness, blesses what we surrender, and breaks what must change so He can mould us for eternal life
By Fr Michael Payyapilly VC
We began this retreat with the Jubilee and the idea of a great reset. That reset has to touch our relationship with God, our relationship with one another and our relationship with ourselves. We are pilgrims, not tourists who are trying to settle permanently into this world. We are moving towards the kingdom of God, and everything the Lord gives us is meant to prepare us for that destination. The Holy Spirit is one of the great gifts Jesus gives us for this journey. He teaches us to become people of the Spirit rather than people governed simply by the flesh, and He keeps directing us towards eternal life. The second great gift I want to place beside that is the Holy Eucharist.
The Eucharist is the Real Presence of Jesus, and at its heart is the extraordinary miracle of transubstantiation. Bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ. Yet the Eucharist is not given to us merely so that we can admire a miracle from a distance. Jesus gives Himself to us because He is preparing us for eternal life, and what takes place at the altar is meant to enter the way we live now. The Eucharist is not only something that happens before us. It is something Christ wants to do within us.
The Eucharist Is Meant to Be Lived
When Jesus tells His disciples to do this in remembrance of Him, biblical remembrance is much richer than simply recalling a past event. Israel remembered the Passover by entering again into what God had done. The unleavened bread was not merely a historical reminder that their ancestors once left Egypt in haste. Generation after generation was asked to celebrate the Passover and live that saving experience as God’s people. In the same way, the Eucharist is not a devotional memory of something that happened two thousand years ago. In the Eucharist we are drawn into the sacrifice of Jesus. We stand, in a sacramental way, at the foot of the Cross with the Blessed Mother, Saint John and those who remained with Him.
That is why the Eucharist must shape the present. Everything the Lord does is ordered towards eternal life, but the journey towards eternal life happens here, in the ordinary circumstances of this earth. The Holy Spirit leads us through this life towards the kingdom, and the Eucharist also has to be lived through this life. Matthew 26:26 gives us a very simple way of seeing that. While they were eating, Jesus took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to His disciples. Four actions: He took, He blessed, He broke and He gave. In this teaching I want to remain with the first three, because they show us something of what Jesus is doing with us every time we come to the Eucharist.
The first action is that Jesus takes the bread. I find it interesting that He chose bread for the Eucharist. He could have chosen something more exotic, something that appeared more impressive, but bread is simple food. I was reminded of that recently in Singapore. I had just arrived for retreats, and after the flight a group insisted on taking me out for dinner. I kept saying that I was not hungry, but people have a wonderful habit of assuming that priests are perpetually hungry, and in Singapore and Malaysia love is very often poured out in the form of food. I ordered a burger because I thought it would be the smallest thing on the menu. When it arrived, it was enormous. It was the opposite of those advertisements where the photograph looks magnificent and what arrives looks, as I joked, rather malnourished.
I looked at this huge burger and my face dropped. The person beside me said, “Don’t worry, Father. Take out the bread and eat the rest.” That sentence stayed with me because bread was the part nobody valued. We look at what is inside the bread, what is under it, what makes the meal interesting. The bread is ordinary. Yet that is what Jesus chose. He took something simple, and that is very consistent with the way God works throughout Scripture. He calls Abraham when Abraham is already an old man. Moses objects that he cannot speak well. David is the son Jesse does not even think to present first to Samuel. Jeremiah says he is only a boy. Again and again, God takes people who do not appear impressive enough for the task and begins His work with them.
Gideon’s story in Judges makes the point very strongly. Gideon begins with a large army, but God keeps reducing it until only three hundred remain, so that Israel cannot claim the victory as the achievement of its own strength. Humanly speaking, you would want the greatest numbers and the strongest presentation. God deliberately removes that security. He chooses the unlikely group and shows what He can do through them. This is what I want us to see when we come to the Eucharist. We do not come because we have finally become the polished people God has been waiting for. We come with weaknesses, faults, inconsistencies and things that still need conversion. Jesus takes us.
During a retreat in another place, there was a man who came to me every day just before Mass. I was vested and preparing to go towards the altar, and this man would come and hug me. I was not used to someone doing that when I was vested, and there was another difficulty: he seemed almost homeless, his clothes were poor, and honestly he did not smell pleasant. Every day he came, hugged me, and then went to sit down. I found myself thinking about the smell on the parish vestments and about how the people sitting beside him might react. Yet as I watched him over those days, I was reminded that this is precisely the kind of person God takes. God takes the person others may not want near them. God takes the one who does not look or smell or present himself in a way the world finds attractive. God takes you and me for the same reason.
There is a hymn we sometimes sing here, “Come as you are.” We can misunderstand that very easily. “Come as you are” does not mean that the way we present ourselves before the Lord no longer matters. I have travelled in many parts of the world, and I have sometimes been surprised at how casually people in Australia can come for Mass. I feel half Aussie, so I claim a little freedom to say this among you: give Jesus some dignity when you come. The invitation to come as you are is not permission to become careless about the sacred. It means that I do not have to hide what is within me before I approach the Lord. I come with my sin, my confusion, my wounds and my weakness because I know that He will take me.
Taken and Blessed
Jesus did not only take the bread. He blessed it. The multiplication of the loaves helps us understand what that means. The disciples look at five loaves and two fish and ask what good such a small amount can possibly be among so many people. Jesus asks for what they have, takes it, blesses it, and what seemed hopelessly inadequate becomes enough. The power was not in those particular loaves and fish. If the same ancient loaves were somehow placed in front of us today, they would not possess a magical ability to multiply. They became significant because Jesus took them and blessed them. The blessing is what changed the meaning of what was placed in His hands.
That is also what He does with us. We bring decisions to Him that may not be perfect because we do not always receive a detailed instruction from heaven telling us exactly what to do. We have to think, use our experience, use the intelligence God has given us and then make a choice. In those moments I can say, “Lord, I do not know whether this is perfect, but I bring it to You. Bless it for me.” What I am placing before Him is not suddenly guaranteed to be flawless, but there is a deep confidence in bringing my life under the blessing of God instead of trying to carry everything by my own strength.
I once used a collection of rosaries to make the same point with volunteers at a retreat centre in India. On one side I placed rosaries that looked attractive, including some from Italy. On the other side were very simple Indian rosaries. I told the volunteers they could choose. Naturally, the attractive rosaries disappeared first. Everyone went back happy with what they had chosen. Then I mentioned that the simple rosaries were the ones I had taken with me through the Holy Land and a European pilgrimage, touching them at the holy sites along the way. One by one, the volunteers came back, returned the attractive rosaries and took the simple ones. Nothing about the plastic or beads had become more beautiful. What changed their value in the eyes of those volunteers was the blessing associated with them.
When Jesus takes us in the Eucharist, He blesses us with all our faults, mistakes, problems and difficulties. There can be moments when we look around a church and imagine that everyone else belongs there more naturally than we do. We know our own history, so we know the things that make us feel unworthy. Yet throughout the Eucharist, Jesus is not standing at a distance waiting for a better version of us to arrive. He takes us and He blesses us. I want that awareness to become part of the way we participate in Mass: every moment I am here, Jesus is taking me and Jesus is blessing me.
This is one reason the Church speaks of celebrating the Eucharist. The priest presides at the celebration, but the whole people of God participate. We are not spectators watching something religious happen at the altar. We are celebrating the astonishing grace that Christ has taken people like us and is not embarrassed to call us His own. When Jesus took the five loaves and two fish, He looked to the Father and gave thanks. I sometimes imagine that same movement in the Eucharist: Christ takes us, looks to the Father, gives thanks and blesses what He has taken. He has confidence in His own blessing even when we have very little confidence in ourselves.
For me, the Eucharist also carries the feeling of a homecoming. When I go home, my parents are very happy to have me there, though the way they show it has changed as they have grown older. My father hardly goes out now, and when I am home he wants me to remain in the house as well. If I decide to go somewhere, my mother will suddenly say, “I want to come with you.” She may tell me that she will simply sit in the car and will not even get out; she just wants to be with me. Parents know this experience when children who have been away come home. They wait, they are excited, and sometimes the children barely notice because they drop their things and disappear into a room. At the Eucharist, I think there is something of that homecoming in the heart of Jesus. He takes us, He blesses us, and ultimately He gives Himself to us.
Then comes the action we would rather avoid. Jesus took the bread, blessed it, and broke it. If the Eucharist is revealing what Christ wants to do in us, then we must not stop at being taken and blessed. The breaking also belongs to the movement.
Broken So We Can Be Moulded
We like the language of being chosen. We like the language of blessing. We are much less enthusiastic when the Lord begins to break what cannot remain as it is. Yet if He is going to mould us for a purpose, some things have to be broken. Scripture is full of people whose lives pass through that kind of breaking. Moses has to lose his confidence in his own position and strength before he can become the man who leads Israel. Saul has to be thrown down from the direction in which he is travelling before he becomes Paul, the apostle. Jacob’s story is another powerful example because he spends much of his early life trying to secure blessing through his own cleverness.
The story of Jacob, Esau, Isaac and Rebekah can read almost like a family drama. Isaac favours Esau, Rebekah favours Jacob, conversations are overheard, disguises are prepared, and Jacob receives the blessing intended for his brother. When blind Isaac asks who he is, Jacob lies and says that he is Esau. When Isaac wonders how the food has been obtained so quickly, Jacob says, “The Lord your God granted me success.” That little phrase is revealing. He does not speak of the Lord as my God. At that point Jacob is using religious language while living largely by manipulation and human cleverness.
When Jacob later flees from Esau, Genesis 28 tells us that he spends a night alone in the wilderness and receives the extraordinary dream at Bethel. God meets him when the securities of home have been stripped away. Later, in Genesis 32, Jacob wrestles through the night at Peniel and comes away with an injured hip. These are distinct moments in his story, but together they show a man being changed through encounters he cannot control. Jacob cannot remain merely the clever son who schemes for what he wants. God is drawing him into a relationship in which self-reliance has to be broken.
I have seen that pattern in my own life. My years in seminary were, for the most part, very smooth. I did well in studies, I was active in sports and extracurricular activities, my prayer life was going well, and I did not have serious negative reports against me. Then, just before my diaconate, I was blamed for something that had happened in the seminary about four years earlier. An anonymous letter claimed that I had been responsible. I knew nothing about it and had not done what I was accused of doing, but the rector believed the letter and included the matter in my report. Seminary reports do not simply disappear. They remain part of the record, which is why I joked that if anyone ever tries to make me a saint, they will eventually find that report and have something interesting to discuss.
The humour came later. At the time I was deeply hurt. I was ordained a deacon and returned for another six months of seminary formation, but many mornings I went before the Lord asking, “Why?” I felt innocent, and what wounded me most was not only the accusation but the feeling that I was not believed. For a long time I battled with it. Looking back now, however, I can say something I could not easily have said then: I needed to be broken. My seminary formation had gone so smoothly that I had never really been broken in that particular way. Years later, when priests or seminarians come to me because they have been misunderstood or accused unfairly, I can feel something of their pain. I know what not being believed can do inside a person. If everything had remained blissful for me, I might have listened to them, but I would not have understood in the same way.
My school years taught me something similar from another direction. I struggled badly with studies. I often failed term examinations and depended more than once on teachers who gave me grace marks. I tell teachers that they should be generous with grace marks because one of those struggling students might become a priest one day. In Year 10, before one of the main examinations in India, I sat the mock exams and failed six subjects out of seven. With only a couple of months left before the real examination, I began praying very seriously. At that time a first class meant about 60 percent. A sensible prayer for someone who had failed six subjects might have been, “Lord, please let me pass,” but I asked the Lord for 60 percent.
To reach 60 percent I needed a total of 360 marks. When the results came, I had 361. People often clap when I tell that story, and some priest friends have wondered why I also tell everyone how badly I struggled beforehand. They say people will think I was not very bright. But the struggle is part of the testimony. When parents come to me worried because a child is finding school difficult, or when I pray with a young person who feels ashamed because everyone else seems to succeed more easily, I understand something of what that child is carrying. A person who has always been at the top of the class may offer excellent advice, but there is a particular compassion that can grow from having struggled. I thank God that He permitted that part of my life to be difficult because He has used it in the way I minister to others.
This does not mean that every painful event should be explained casually by saying, “God is breaking you,” as though pain itself were automatically holy. What I am saying is what I have learned through these experiences and what the Scriptures teach about discipline and testing: God can use what is painful to form something in us that comfort alone may never produce. Hebrews 12:11 says that discipline seems painful rather than pleasant at the time, but later yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness in those trained by it. James likewise tells us to consider trials with joy because the testing of faith produces endurance. Neither passage pretends that the process feels pleasant. The fruit becomes visible later.
That is the difficulty. If I stand before you and say, “Jesus takes you,” everybody is happy. If I say, “Jesus blesses you,” everybody is even happier. Then I ask, “How many of you want Him to break you?” and suddenly the enthusiasm becomes much quieter. We want the blessing without the breaking because we cannot yet see what the Lord intends to mould. But Christ is not breaking for the sake of destruction. The image is closer to a mother passing through the pain of labour before the joy of seeing her child. The pain is real, yet it is moving towards life.
Break Me So You Can Mould Me
This is how I want us to enter the Eucharist. Jesus takes the simple person I am. He does not wait until every fault has disappeared before He receives me. He blesses me throughout the celebration, and the deepest blessing is His own presence given to me. Then, because He loves me for eternal life and not merely for the comfort of the present moment, He also begins to break what is a hindrance. Pride may have to be broken. Self-reliance may have to be broken. The need always to be understood, admired or proved right may have to be broken. There are parts of us that cannot simply be decorated with religious language; they have to be surrendered so that Christ can mould us according to His purpose.
The great reset we have been speaking about cannot happen only at the level of ideas. The Holy Spirit must become part of our life, and the sacred Eucharist must become part of us. At every Eucharist I can remember those actions of Jesus: He took, He blessed, He broke. I can recognise that I am the simple bread He has chosen to take. I can receive His blessing without pretending that I am already perfect. And when life brings me into a place where something in me is being painfully exposed or surrendered, I can ask whether the Lord is using even this to prepare me for what comes next.
So the prayer with which I want to end is not an easy prayer, but it is a prayer of trust: Lord, break me so You can mould me. Break in me what is unwanted and what is becoming a hindrance. I may not understand the breaking while it is happening, just as I did not understand some of the painful moments in my own formation when I was living through them. But I trust that Your purpose is blessed. Take me, bless me, and when I need to be broken, give me the grace not to run from Your hands. Break me so You can mould me for the life You are preparing me to receive.
Adapted and edited from a talk delivered by Fr Michael Payyapilly VC during Divine Australia’s “Powered by the Holy Spirit” Live-In Retreat, held at Belgrave Heights Convention Centre, Belgrave Heights, Victoria, on 20 July 2025.