A Quiet Miracle

There is a quiet miracle that happens in our parish almost every morning. While buses rattle along the High Road and trains hurry into town, while children pull on school uniforms and shops lift their shutters, in the stillness of the church the Eucharist is offered. Bread and wine are set upon the altar, the prayers of the people are spoken, and Christ once more gives himself for the life of the world. To the eye it is a small thing, easily overlooked, but in truth it is the deepest thing we do.

The Mass each day is not a clerical hobby or a pious extra, but the beating heart of the Church. From the very beginning it has been so. The Acts of the Apostles tells us that the first Christians “devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers” (Acts 2.42). The breaking of bread was not an occasional rite reserved for feast days; it was their daily rhythm, the pulse of their new life in Christ. To neglect it would have been to neglect him who made himself known “in the breaking of the bread” (Luke 24.35).

The Fathers urged the same constancy. St Ambrose pressed his congregation: “If it is our daily bread, why do you take it only once a year? Receive daily what profits you daily” (On the Sacraments V.25). St Cyprian, reflecting on the Lord’s Prayer, insisted that “daily bread” means the Eucharist itself: “We who live in Christ and receive His Eucharist daily as the food of salvation should receive it in such a way that it may continually avail to the life of our souls” (On the Lord’s Prayer 18). Daily celebration was not seen as extravagance but necessity, as essential to the soul as bread is to the body.

This rhythm sanctifies more than the hour of Mass itself. When bread and wine are lifted up, they carry with them the work of many hands: sowing and reaping, baking and fermenting, labour and waiting, hunger and joy. They symbolise not only food and drink but the very texture of life. The Eucharist does not abolish these things but transfigures them. St Teresa of Ávila said that God “moves among the pots and pans,” and Brother Lawrence found God’s presence as surely while turning an omelette in a pan as when kneeling before the Sacrament. To celebrate the Mass daily is to learn that grace is hidden in the fabric of every day, in kitchens and streets as much as in sanctuaries.

Here in Ilford this takes on a particular shape. The weekday liturgy is often quiet, sometimes with only a handful gathered. Yet it is here that the Scriptures are unfolded day by day, patiently leading us through the whole counsel of God. Here the saints are remembered, their witness strengthening ours. Here anniversaries of birth and death are marked, the sick prayed for by name, the grieving held in silence, and the departed commended to God. Here the worker slips in before an early shift, the elderly person finds comfort in the quiet, and the one carrying unspoken sorrow discovers hope in Christ’s presence. These liturgies are not diminished because they are small; they are radiant because Christ himself is there.

And yet the Mass gathers more than those who are present. As I stand at the altar I am conscious, too, of those outside. The homeless man asleep in the churchyard whose body aches with the cold. The addict pacing the High Road, desperate for the next fix. The woman behind the church, forced to sell the only thing she has left. The child who walks to school with an empty stomach. The migrant who has arrived with no language, no papers, no safety. The neighbour who smiles in public but carries a heart shattered by grief. All of these lives, fragile and unguarded, are gathered into the offering. Their struggles are placed with the bread and wine, lifted up to God who alone can redeem what seems beyond redemption.

That is the mystery of the Eucharist: it is not removed from suffering but set right in the middle of it. Christ’s own sacrifice was not neat or detached, but poured out amid betrayal, poverty, injustice and pain. When the priest prays, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands,” he names more than flour and grapes. He names the whole toil and struggle of human life. Every cry from the street, every act of labour, every act of survival is caught up in that prayer. The Mass is the place where the world’s brokenness is not denied but offered, and in being offered is transfigured.

For the priest, daily celebration becomes a school of formation. It calls us back, day after day, into thanksgiving and intercession, into silence and awe. It saves us from confusing busyness with holiness, from imagining that ministry is ours to accomplish. Augustine’s reminder still speaks: “Be what you see; receive what you are — the Body of Christ” (Sermon 272). Each morning, that identity is renewed at the altar so that it may be lived out in the street, the office, the kitchen, the school.

In a place as restless and fragmented as Ilford, this matters. The daily Mass is a lamp burning steadily at the parish’s centre, a sign that God has not abandoned his people. It is the Church’s quiet but radical witness that time itself belongs to God. It consecrates the rhythm of life: pots and pans, buses and pavements, tears and laughter, hunger and hope.

And the Eucharist does not end at the altar. It flows outward into the streets, into homes and workplaces, into kitchens and classrooms. To receive the Body of Christ is to be sent as the Body of Christ. What we offer in bread and wine we are commanded to live in flesh and blood. The broken Body we receive equips us to walk with the broken in our parish. The chalice we share commits us to share the suffering of those who thirst for hope.

So when the Eucharist is finished and the candles are extinguished, its light is not put out. It burns in the acts of mercy that follow: the neighbour visited, the hungry child fed, the addict listened to with patience, the refugee welcomed, the grieving comforted. The Mass makes all these things possible, because it is Christ himself who goes with us.

This is why the daily Mass matters in Ilford. It matters because here the whole life of the parish and the whole life of the city are gathered up, sanctified and returned as gift. It matters because it is from here that the Church finds the strength to serve, to speak, to endure, to rejoice. In the end it is simple: the Eucharist is the life of the world. And every time it is offered, Christ makes all things new — in the church, in the High Road, in the kitchens and classrooms, in the broken hearts and weary hands of his people.