BREAD BROKEN AND SHARED provides a dramatic new look at Eucharist, one that seeks to make Christians sensitive to its meaning, and offers some astounding implications: At Mass we are expressing and celebrating our potential - to be the Body of Christ, the church, and to give our lives for others; it pledges us to alleviate human suffering and address its causes, to build the kingdom for which Jesus lived and died. "if we do not," says Father Bernier, "our liturgies are empty." There is always the insidious temptation to impoverish the Eucharist, he claims. "We surround it with ceremony, give it the awesome reverence due to God, and thereby lock it safely within our churches. It has gone from being the ultimate expression of Jesus' gift of self to a needy world, to a harmless ritual which has ceased to challenge us."
Father Bernier's answer is to explore the scriptures in an innovative manner, actually "reading scriptures from a eucharistic perspective," a procedure he shows to be consistent with the purpose of the writers themselves. From that perspective, the gospels and epistles are seen as a direct link to the eucharistic life of the early church and therefore a model for eucharistic life in every age. The practical implications of his "new look" include being brothers and sisters of Jesus, sharing God's salvation in Christ, being unified under the covenant of love and service, eating from the Lord's table, living fie Eucharist in our daily lives, and being personally and globally transformed - a totally new life of worship, witness and discipleship.