Saying Hello with Goodbyes

Life is filled with hellos and goodbyes! Normally, goodbyes are more difficult to say. Especially when we are saying bye to family, special friends, and childhood classmate, etc. And the hardest goodbye is for someone who leaves this life for the next.

It is a common experience for many to say extended goodbyes. Did you ever count the goodbyes after cordially informing your host that you’re going? After the first, a second followed when you stop by a living room family picture. Then a third along the hallway leading to the main entrance. Maybe a fifth or a sixth already in your car, the engine idling, and as you reluctantly wiggled your fingers through the closing window pane to say the seventh.

We are lucky if such goodbyes didn’t turn out as good mornings!

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We cannot really help but ‘not say goodbye’ and yet continue saying it. Man is such that he has a world to work in, a family and friends to love and a story to finish before God.

Until then, we could only really mean that we are off to ‘doing something else’ or that ‘we hate to go, but we must be going’ and so forth. It is only at life’s end that the others get to say goodbye, and if at all consciously and audibly do we barely manage to return their fare thee wells.

Thus we must cherish every goodbye while we can. It helps to value each living moment, and never to regret one day of having passed people by during our life.

There is, however, someone who has managed to cheat goodbyes. He truly meant it, said it, and finally went. But that man’s presence has become presently more transforming of us than ever.

He meant what he said because He was a man whose heart truly felt sad about leaving. But He was able to cheat it, because He was God Who chose to remain in spite of having truly said goodbye. This God-man was Jesus!

God also hates saying goodbyes! That is why He chose to remain in a most miraculous way: in the Eucharist, the Sacrament of the Holy Mass.

He told His disciples how He greatly desired to sup with them again in His Kingdom one day. Unsatisfied and impatient to wait till time’s end, Jesus left the portal of the Holy Mass which would make Him really present in a miraculous way. But this is not all!

In the Holy Mass, Christ’s presence is made accessible to all men and women of all times. It is through this celestial nourishment of His Body and Blood that He enters into our lives, bringing to each sincere and loving heart His ever-growing gifts of faith, hope and love.

Through the Holy Sacrifice He wants to mysteriously reign by not forcing His love upon us. Rather, He leaves it to our freedom to desire this unique presence in us and to prepare ourselves to worthily receive and share Him. In this way, out of love, He becomes our servant who is ready to do whatever we may ask of Him.

And in the Sacrament of the Eucharist, He mercifully reveals the ‘Father’s face’. There He embraces His prodigal children. He wants them never to lose hope despite their many cold goodbyes manifested in their pride, greed, anger, lust, and other sins. Christ never gives up on them! Instead, He makes sure that each Mass will be an eternal hello that transforms each man’s temporal goodbyes into hope, peace and love.