This week has been confession and the Eucharist, two sacraments I used to think of as separate errands. Go get forgiven, go get fed, check the boxes, move on with the day.

There’s a verse I keep landing on instead. “Taste and see that the LORD is good” (Psalm 34:8). Not think about, not agree that. Taste. It’s an invitation into something, not a fact to accept, and it assumes I’m hungry enough to want it.

That’s what these two weeks have started to undo in me. Confession isn’t a transaction to clear a debt. The Eucharist isn’t a symbol to consider. Both are actual contact with a God who wants to be tasted, not just believed in from a safe distance.

So here’s what I’m sitting with today, no answer, just a question for myself. When did I last let myself actually taste this, instead of just going through it out of habit?

Maybe that’s worth asking before Mass tomorrow.

Today’s Bible Study

Peter picks up this same language later. “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, so that by it you may grow up into salvation, if indeed you have tasted that the Lord is good” (1 Peter 2:2 to 3). He’s quoting the Psalm almost word for word, but pointing it at something specific, the hunger of someone just starting out, still small, still needing to be fed regularly instead of just once. Confession and the Eucharist aren’t a season I finish and move past into something more advanced. They’re the milk. I don’t graduate out of needing them. I just keep coming back hungry.

Recommended Reading

If any of this is stirring something, Thomas a Kempis wrote a whole section of The Imitation of Christ on exactly this, Book IV, on the Blessed Sacrament. It’s five hundred years old and reads like it was written this morning.