How the Eucharist nourishes us, moulds us and sends us to carry Christ into our families, the Church and the world
By Fr Michael Payyapilly VC
When we speak about the Eucharist, we naturally think first about what Jesus gives us. Yet there is another part of the mystery that we must understand: what Jesus intends to do with us after we have received Him. In the Eucharist we see the pattern of His own self-giving. He takes, He blesses, He breaks, and He gives. That same pattern is at work in our lives. We are taken and blessed by God, but we are also broken and moulded, and the reason He breaks and moulds us is not simply for our own sanctification. He does it so that He can give us. We have received from Jesus, and now we are meant to be given so that, through our lives, Jesus Himself can be given to others.
At the altar we speak of the priest acting in persona Christi, in the person of Christ. But when you receive the Body and Blood of Jesus, the Eucharist does not end at the altar. Jesus is in you. You carry His presence. In that sense, the Eucharist changes not only what you receive but also who you are being sent out to become. You are taken, blessed and moulded so that you can be given.
This helps us understand the conversation between Jesus and Peter after the Resurrection. Jesus asks Peter three times, “Do you love me?” We often connect those questions only with Peter’s three denials, as though Jesus were simply cancelling the denials with three declarations of love. But the deeper purpose becomes clear in what Jesus says next: “Feed my sheep. Tend my flock.” Jesus is preparing to give Peter to the flock. Before doing so, He makes sure that Peter loves Him, because if Peter does not love Jesus, there will come a point when he will begin to resent the flock entrusted to him. If he loves Jesus, however, that love can sustain the responsibility of loving the people Jesus gives him.
That is the earthly purpose of the Eucharist I want us to see. I have spoken about its divine purpose, eternal life, but the Eucharist also sends us into the world. Jesus takes us, blesses us, breaks and moulds us, and then gives us. We do not leave Mass merely as people who have attended something sacred. We leave carrying Christ, and therefore we leave with a mission.
You Are the Manna God Is Sending
The image I want to use is the manna in Exodus 16. Israel is travelling through the wilderness. The people are hungry, they complain to Moses, and they begin remembering Egypt as though slavery had somehow been better than the uncertainty of the journey. God responds by promising that each morning He will provide manna. They are to go out and take what they need.
That detail matters. God provides according to need, and one person’s need may not be the same as another’s. Human beings are not always very good at that. If there are food packets and Vivian needs two while somebody else needs only one, we are quite capable of saying, “No, everybody gets one,” because we measure another person’s need according to our own system. God does not work like that. He knows the need, and He provides accordingly.
The manna itself was not some exotic meal. It was a sustaining meal. It kept the people alive and kept them moving towards the Promised Land. God does not always give us exotic things, but He gives us what will sustain us. More importantly, the manna was given by God. It was not something the Israelites manufactured for themselves. That is the image I want you to carry from the Eucharist into your own life. God prepares His manna, and then He gives it to His people. First, He gives you as manna to your family.
Many of us become discouraged because our families do not pray as we would like them to pray. They may not go to church. You come for a retreat, listen to teaching about eternal life, go home full of enthusiasm and speak about eternal life to a husband who is sitting there with no interest whatsoever. Sometimes, after all your prayers and all your efforts, you return home and they make fun of you because you are always going to church. In those moments, remember what you are. You are the manna God is sending every day into that family. You are not simply attending Mass for yourself. You are being nourished and sent back so that, through you, others may also be nourished.
Why did God provide manna every morning? Why not give the Israelites a weekly quota so that they could collect everything at once and return seven days later? Because God wanted them to come back to Him. He was not merely filling their stomachs. He was building a relationship. For forty years, the daily manna kept reminding Israel that its life depended upon God. In the same way, when God gives you as manna to your family, the purpose is not to make you the centre of their spiritual lives. It is not so that you can say, “I pray for all of them, and they do not even love me or respect me.” It is not about you. God desires a relationship with your family, and He has chosen to use you as one of the ways through which that relationship can grow.
That means you should not return home disappointed simply because your spouse or your children did not come to the retreat. Maybe you desperately wanted them to come. Maybe they promised they would come and then, at the last minute, they scooted. You sit through the sessions thinking, “This is exactly what he needed to hear.” We do that very easily. We listen to the Word of God and immediately begin applying it to the person who is not in the room.
I used to see this very clearly in our retreat centre in India during the couples’ Mass. Normally the ladies sat on one side and the men on the other, an arrangement I suspect some of the men were quite happy with. But for the couples’ Mass we would make husband and wife sit together. While I was preaching about marriage, I could see some wives positioning themselves just behind their husbands so they could watch whether the husband was listening. Sometimes a little pinch was required to make sure the important point had registered.
Once a wife came to me very disturbed because her husband had not gone for Confession. I asked her how she knew. “I can see him,” she said. Confessions had already finished, and she was genuinely upset that he had not gone. So I asked her, “Did you go for Confession?” She replied, “No, Father. I was waiting for him to go.” There is something wonderfully human in that exchange, but it also exposes how easily we become preoccupied with what somebody else should be doing. We can sit in the presence of God listening to His Word and spend the whole time deciding who else needs to hear it.
Our phones reveal the same tendency. We go on a trip, attend a concert, watch a game or come to a retreat, and instead of being present we spend the entire experience looking through a screen because we are recording it for somebody else. I remember going to Botswana with Father Joseph, whom many people know from the UK. He does not particularly enjoy going out, while I am exactly the opposite, so it can be quite difficult to persuade him to go anywhere. One day we were sitting inside and I noticed him busily taking photographs with his phone. When I looked more closely, he had opened National Geographic and was photographing the pictures of animals printed in the magazine. I asked him what he was doing. He told me, quite happily, that he would go back and show the volunteers the animals he had seen in Botswana. He had not gone out to see them at all. He was photographing the animals in National Geographic so that later he could show everyone what he had supposedly “seen”.
That story is funny, but there is something rather accurate about it. We can be physically present somewhere while our attention is already occupied with how we will package the experience for somebody else. Spiritually, we do the same. We sit at a retreat thinking, “This is for that poor thing sitting at home. He has no clue what is going to hit him when I get back.” But you are the one who is here. God knows what He is doing. Do not underestimate Him. You are the manna He has brought here, nourished here and prepared here. Your family may not believe. They may not come to church. Yet God can still nourish them because He is sending His manna back into that home through you.
There is another important detail about the manna. What the Israelites tried to preserve unnecessarily did not remain fresh. Framed through the way I have been reflecting on this passage, the manna remained sustaining because it was connected to God’s provision for that day. God’s grace and mercy are new every morning. We cannot imagine that yesterday’s relationship with Christ will sustain us indefinitely while we stop returning to Him. The Church gives us Sunday as an obligation, but as much as you are able, come to Holy Mass during the week as well. Every day the Lord can renew you and send you out again, fresh in Christ. As Jesus tells us in John 15:5, apart from Him we can do nothing.
And remember that you are not necessarily the manna for every person in every season. We sometimes imagine that the priest must be the answer to every problem. “Father, if you tell them, I am sure they will change.” We know perfectly well that they may not change. Sometimes I am simply not the manna God has chosen for that person. He knows whom He is sending. The same is true within families. You are manna for your family for a particular period of their journey, but God may later bring somebody else into their lives. This is especially important for parents whose children have married. God may provide a new manna through the person your son or daughter has married. Do not become jealous of the new manna and keep trying to stuff the old manna into everything. Let go. Trust that the Lord knows how to sustain His people.
Go Forth: The Eucharist Gives You a Mission
This is why the words at the end of Mass matter so much. The Church does not simply say, “Mass is ended, go home.” That would be the obvious conclusion if the Eucharist were merely an event we attended before returning to normal life. We could just as easily say, “Mass is ended, go to the mall,” or “Mass is ended, go to the beach.” Instead, the Church says, “Go forth.” There is a sending because the Eucharist has a purpose beyond the walls of the church.
Throughout the Eucharist we stand before the Lord like Peter saying, “Yes, Lord, I love you.” Then the Lord answers us as He answered Peter: “Feed my sheep. Tend my flock. Go.” The One who is present in the Eucharist sends those who have received Him into the world. We are given as manna first to our families, but not only to our own small circles. We are sent to the community and ultimately into the mission of the Church.
This is why the command of Jesus in Matthew 28 is not optional background material for a few unusually enthusiastic Christians. “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations.” To whom is Jesus speaking? To disciples. Mission is not reserved to priests and religious. Every disciple has to take seriously the question of how the message of Christ is being carried into the world. Someone sacrificed so that we could receive the faith. Who will sacrifice so that the next generation receives it?
One of the dangers in our time is that we have made discipleship intensely private. We can even become embarrassed to hold a Rosary and pray in public. Everything is meant to stay inside. Faith becomes something for me and my family, measured by what I receive, what my family receives and whether our own spiritual needs are being met. But discipleship that never becomes missionary has lost something essential. We have been sent.
Being sent also changes the standard by which we live. I am a priest. Of course I can take a holiday from work, but I cannot take a holiday from priesthood. I cannot decide that for a few days I am no longer a priest and therefore I can behave however I please. People rightly expect a certain integrity from a priest because priesthood is not simply a uniform that can be removed when it becomes inconvenient.
Yet Christians sometimes create a different standard for themselves. We are serious about discipleship in church, but elsewhere we tell ourselves, “What is there in a little bit of this or a little bit of that?” If I have received Christ and I am being sent as His manna, then my words should reflect Christ and my actions should resemble Christ. We cannot demand consistency from the priest while imagining that Christian discipleship allows us occasional holidays from being Christian.
Consider something as ordinary as the way we speak about other people. We would immediately recognise the absurdity of imagining Jesus walking around gossiping: “I heard from somebody, who heard from somebody else, that Father Michael is not a very good fellow. Apparently he sleeps all the time.” The picture sounds ridiculous because we know it is incompatible with Christ. Then we have to ask why the same behaviour becomes acceptable when it comes from us. If I have received the Body and Blood of Jesus and carry Christ within me, then I am sent to build relationships with Christ, not to damage them. The Eucharistic question is therefore not only, “What have I received?” but also, “How can I be Jesus’ manna in this world?”
That question challenges the receiver mentality we so easily develop. Even after a retreat, somebody will ask, “What did you get from it?” The question is almost automatic because we assume that whenever we go somewhere, we are meant to get something. We approach Jesus in the same way. Prayer becomes “give, give, give”. But the disciples and apostles were not formed merely to receive. They were sent to give. So can we return from a retreat as givers rather than remaining receivers? Can we begin to ask Jesus a different question: “Lord, what do You want me to do for You?”
What Do You Want Me to Do for You?
That is a much more demanding prayer because it requires love. I can ask Jesus for many things without surrendering myself to Him. But to say, “Lord, tell me what You want me to do, and I will do it,” requires a heart that trusts Him enough to accept the answer. There will be sacrifice in such a prayer. There may be pain. Yet when the response is rooted in love for Jesus, sacrifice is no longer the first thing we see.
People often ask me about my vocation story. The real beginning was not the moment I heard the call to priesthood. It went back to my first retreat, when I genuinely fell in love with Jesus. For four years after that retreat I had no desire to become a priest. I was not thinking about priesthood at all. Then one day, after a novena to St Jude, I was praying in a church and heard a very clear voice telling me, “Become a priest.” St Jude is the patron saint of hopeless cases, so you can understand why I had developed such a devotion to him.
It took me about a minute to make the decision. Looking back, however, I would never say that the vocation was created in that single minute. The Lord had already been working in me, and there was also a period of sustained prayer that followed. What still strikes me is how I was able to answer so quickly. The one thing I know is that I was passionately in love with Jesus. If the Lord had asked me to go to the moon, I would have gone to the moon. I was ready to ask, “Jesus, what do You want me to do for You?” and whatever His answer was, I wanted to give Him my yes.
A young man once came to me during a retreat and told me he was terrified. When I asked why, he said, “I heard your testimony, and I am scared Jesus will call me.” I told him not to worry. The Lord will mould you first, and you may not even realise what He is doing. A vocation does not necessarily begin one morning when somebody wakes up and suddenly announces, “Yes, I want to be a priest.” The Lord is much more patient than that. He takes, He blesses, He breaks, He moulds, and then He asks the question. He prepares the heart before asking for the gift.
This brings us back to Peter. Jesus asks, “Do you love me?” before sending him to tend the flock because love is what makes sacrifice possible. If Peter did not love Jesus deeply, the first time the flock became difficult he would have walked away. We can see a small version of that even in parish service. We help in the Church, something becomes difficult, Father does not say anything nice about what we have done, and suddenly we say, “I am finished with this.” Sometimes that reaction reveals that our service was more dependent upon appreciation than upon love for Jesus. Love is what allows us to remain when service costs us something.
I often think about the early missionaries in this context, particularly St Thomas. Those of us from Kerala proudly call ourselves St Thomas Christians, and we will tell anyone who will give an ear that St Thomas came to Kerala two thousand years ago. But sometimes I sit and wonder how on earth that man actually got there. He did not know the language. He left everything familiar and travelled into an unknown land. I lived in Sri Lanka for three years and barely learned anything of the language, yet these missionaries crossed cultures and boundaries because they loved Jesus and believed that His message could not remain hidden. It had to be proclaimed, and they were prepared to sacrifice themselves for that proclamation.
Perhaps our difficulty is that we are still too accustomed to receiving. We keep asking what Jesus will give us, while He has been moulding us precisely because He intends to give us. The question is not whether every Christian is called to the same form of mission. The question is whether we are willing to be available to the Lord who sends.
Give the Church Your Today
Jesus says that the harvest is plentiful and the labourers are few, and He tells us to pray to the Lord of the harvest to send labourers. Before asking whether we are prepared to become labourers, however, there is another question: do we actually feel connected to the harvest? A person who feels nothing for the harvest will not pray seriously for labourers.
I learned something about that in a very ordinary way. I was brought up in Dubai, and when we moved back to Kerala my father had about seven or eight acres on which he planted different crops. One of them was tapioca. The roots grow underground, while the stems rise quite high, and there was a whole tapioca plantation behind the house. Sometimes I would walk through it imagining myself to be Rambo. I had a machete-like knife and would go through the plantation chopping the stems, chop, chop, chop. The next day my father would look at the damage and ask, “How did this happen?” I would look at him and say, “I don’t know.” Thankfully the crop was almost ready to be harvested, so it was not a complete loss.
What I remember now is that I did not feel my father’s pain because I was not connected to the labour that had gone into the field. Food appeared on my table, so why should I be bothered? That is the danger. If we are not connected to the harvest, we will not feel for the harvest. And if we do not feel for it, we will neither pray for labourers nor recognise that the Lord may be asking us to become part of the answer.
The harvest around us is enormous. In Australia today, many parishes are sustained in large part by migrants, while the wider society contains huge numbers of people who are distant from the life of the Church. In the United Kingdom, I increasingly find that what we are facing is not simply re-evangelisation. We are reaching the point of ad gentes, first evangelisation, because there is now a generation of people who have hardly heard of Jesus at all. These are not simply people who once went to church and stopped. Many genuinely do not know Him.
That reality changes the way we have to think about mission. If we remain sitting inside churches waiting for people to come, many of them will never come. We have to go out. Recently I was walking through Liverpool near a shopping area. There was a man standing with a speaker, preaching on the roadside. Not one person had stopped to listen; everybody simply walked past him. About twenty metres away another man was singing, and a large crowd had gathered around him, dancing. I looked at the contrast and thought about how easily the Word of God can be rejected, and how many labourers are needed for this harvest.
So when the Lord asks, “Who will go for me?” we cannot spend our lives explaining why we are unsuitable. Moses tried that. We have our own versions: “I am not good enough. I do not know enough. I am too old. I will do something when I retire.” Do not wait until retirement to give yourself to the Church. I say that carefully. I am not saying that those who are elderly have nothing to give. I am saying the opposite: give your today. Do not postpone the gift of yourself to some imagined future when you think you will finally have enough time.
And I say the same thing to the young. Please do not tell young people that they are the tomorrow of the Church. What nonsense. They are the today of the Church. The elderly are the today of the Church. The young are the today of the Church. I am the today of the Church. None of us possesses tomorrow. What we can give Jesus is today.
If the Lord is calling a young man or woman to priesthood or religious life, be brave enough to listen. It is not an easy life, but it is a blessed life. Do not suddenly become deaf only when Jesus asks you to do something difficult. We are very willing to hear Him when He speaks about what we want, but vocation asks whether we will also hear Him when He asks for us.
And do not imagine that God calls only those who appear naturally suited to the task. I still become nervous before preaching. Before I begin, I often find myself praying, “Lord, just get me through it.” Then I start, and something happens. The Spirit takes control. I have spoken about this with Father Joseph and other priests, and many of us recognise the same experience. The Lord did not call us because we were the best.
Twenty-nine of us in my batch were ordained together, though we had begun with around forty-five. I joke that all the good ones went back and the waste remained. We had men who were excellent in studies, gifted musicians and people with many obvious talents, and a number of them left. Those of us who remained were not necessarily the ones everybody would have selected at the beginning. That is often how God works. He calls us into places where we have to look to heaven every day and say, “Lord, help me.” Then we cannot pretend the fruit belongs to us. The glory belongs to Him.
Manna only makes sense while it remains connected to the God who gives it. By itself it has no sustaining power. The same is true of our mission. We cannot become what Jesus wants simply by trying harder or by imagining that we are sufficient in ourselves. We have to remain close to Him.
That is why I want you to hold on to the two great gifts we have been speaking about during this retreat: the Holy Spirit and the Eucharist. The Holy Spirit is the Teacher. He will teach you what you need to know. The Eucharist will keep you close to the Church and close to the altar. From there you will grow, and along the way the Lord will send other manna into your life as well, people who will teach you, strengthen you and sustain you in Christ.
This retreat was never intended to be comprehensive. I wanted you to receive a few things that you could hold on to and continue the journey with. One is the Holy Spirit. The other is the Eucharist. Together they lead us into what I have called the great reset, the willingness to return to square one and allow the Lord to begin again in us. That reset will involve the breaking of our egos. Let Him do it. He is not breaking us in order to destroy us. He is moulding us so that we can become more fully the people He created us to be, in His image and likeness, and so that He can give us to the world He loves.
We are all journeying towards the Promised Land, but what we do during the journey matters. The Eucharist is not simply food for private consolation on the way. It takes us, blesses us, moulds us and sends us. We receive Christ so that we can carry Christ. We are nourished so that, in Him, we can nourish others. We are given so that Jesus can continue to give Himself through us. So let this become our prayer: “Jesus, let that passion burn in me. Tell me what You want me to do for You, and I will do it because I love You more than everything else.”
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.