Patrick Comerford
We have returned to Ordinary Time in the Church Calendar. This week began with Trinity Sunday (31 May 2026), and in the calendar of the Church of England in Common Worship today is the Feast of Corpus Christi (4 June 2026) or the Day of Thanksgiving for the Institution of Holy Communion.
I have some long journeys ahead of me later today, and I am going to miss this evening's readings and rehearsals by the local playreading and drama group in the library in Stony Stratford. But before today begins, as I wait in Luton Airport, I am taking some quiet time this morning to give thanks, to reflect, to pray and to read in these ways:
1, reading today’s Gospel reading;
2, a short reflection;
3, a prayer from the USPG prayer diary;
4, the Collects and Post-Communion prayer of the day.
John 6: 51-58 (NRSVA):
[Jesus said:] 51 ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’
52 The Jews then disputed among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ 53 So Jesus said to them, ‘Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. 54 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up on the last day; 55 for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. 56 Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. 57 Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so whoever eats me will live because of me. 58 This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. But the one who eats this bread will live for ever.’
Today’s reflections:
The Cambridge priest-poet Malcolm Guite, in a posting on his blog two years ago (30 May 2024), recalled how the Feast of Corpus Christi was marked in mediaeval times with a processions in which the consecrated elements were taken out of the church and processed on the streets, ‘showing that the Word made flesh was not just in a box labelled ‘church’ but in our midst, just as he was on the streets of Nazareth and Jerusalem’.
The Feast of Corpus Christi is marked in the calendar of many Anglican churches on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, and is being celebrated in many English churches and cathedrals today. For example, there is a Solemn Eucharist in Lichfield Cathedral at 7:30 this evening, when the setting is Benjamin Britten’s Missa Brevis. Saint Editha’s Church, Tamworth, is celebrating the Feast of Corpus Christi with the Sung Eucharist at 7:30 pm.
Traditionally, there has been a Corpus Christi procession in Cambridge each year, with the Sung Eucharist at St Bene’t’s Church at 7 p.m., then moving along Trumpington Street, passing Corpus Christi College, Fitzbillies and the Fitzwilliam Museum as it processes to Little Saint Mary’s for Benediction, followed by refreshments.
Pusey House in Oxford is celebrating Corpus Christi this week evening with High Mass at 6 pm and a Corpus Christi procession to Keble College Chapel, the preacher this evening is the Right Revd Dr John Hind, sometime Bishop of Chichester.
At All Saints’ Church, Margaret Street, London, the Corpus Christi celebrations include High Mass at 6.30 pm, when the preacher is Father David Houlding, who has chaired the Catholic Group on General Synod; the music includes: Missa Aeterna Christi Munera by Palestrina Mozart’s Ave Verum Corpus, and Tantum Ergo by Henschel.
In that blog posting marking the Feast of Corpus Christi in 2024, Malcolm Guite also offered a trio of sonnets about the experience of receiving Holy Communion, each from a slightly different angle.
His first two sonnets were published in Sounding the Seasons (2012), his cycle of 70 sonnets for the Church Year. The book is available on both Amazon UK and the USA, and is also out on Kindle:
1 Love’s Choice
This bread is light, dissolving, almost air,
A little visitation on my tongue,
A wafer-thin sensation, hardly there.
This taste of wine is brief in flavour, flung
A moment to the palate’s roof and fled,
Even its aftertaste a memory.
Yet this is how He comes. Through wine and bread
Love chooses to be emptied into me.
He does not come in unimagined light
Too bright to be denied, too absolute
For consciousness, too strong for sight,
Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute;
Chooses instead to seep into each sense,
To dye himself into experience.
2, Hide and Seek
Ready or not, you tell me, here I come!
And so I know I’m hiding, and I know
My hiding-place is useless. You will come
And find me. You are searching high and low.
Today I’m hiding low, down here, below,
Below the sunlit surface others see.
Oh find me quickly, quickly come to me.
And here you come and here I come to you.
I come to you because you come to me.
You know my hiding places. I know you,
I reach you through your hiding-places too;
Touching the slender thread, but now I see –
Even in darkness I can see you shine,
Risen in bread, and revelling in wine.
Malcolm Guite’s third sonnet for Corpus Christi is about the 16th century oak communion table in the Church of Saint Edward King and Martyr, Cambridge, and is from his book The Singing Bowl (2013), also published by Canterbury Press:
3, This Table
The centuries have settled on this table
Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth
Which bears afresh our changing elements.
Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble,
Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both
In aching absence and in absent presence.
This table too the earth herself has given
And human hands have made. Where candle-flame
At corners burns and turns the air to light
The oak once held its branches up to heaven,
Blessing the elements which it became,
Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.
Because another tree can bear, unbearable,
For us, the weight of Love, so can this table.
Today’s Prayers (Thursday 4 June 2026, Corpus Christi):
A new edition of Pray with the World Church, the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel), was published last week, in time for the USPG conference in the High Leigh, Hertfordshire, which opened on Tuesday (2 June) and continues until today (4 June). The theme this week, from 31 May to 6 June 2026 (pp 6-7), is ‘Peacebuilding in the Gulf’. This theme was introduced on Sunday with a reflection from Saint Christopher’s Cathedral in Bahrain.
The USPG Prayer Diary today (Thursday 4 June 2026, Corpus Christi) invites us to pray:
We give thanks for the gift of Holy Communion, in which Christ nourishes and sustains us. May it inspire us to love and serve one another with humility.
The Collect:
Lord Jesus Christ,
we thank you that in this wonderful sacrament
you have given us the memorial of your passion:
grant us so to reverence the sacred mysteries
of your body and blood
that we may know within ourselves
and show forth in our lives
the fruits of your redemption;
for you are alive and reign with the Father
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.
The Post-Communion Prayer:
All praise to you, our God and Father,
for you have fed us with the bread of heaven
and quenched our thirst from the true vine:
hear our prayer that, being grafted into Christ,
we may grow together in unity
and feast with him in his kingdom;
through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Yesterday’s Reflections
Continued Tomorrow
Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org
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