I had a religious experience once. My whole life is a religious experience, being religious and all, but this was different.  It was a specifically religious experience.  I am going to share it with you, potentially the entire technologically tapped in world because I have a defective filter about what personal information one should share. 

I pretty much share all of it.

By the way, everything I write on this blog is true.  Not making it up.  Sometimes I wish I was, but not this time.

One day, when I was pregnant with, about oh, my sixth baby and my life was just chock full of small children and bigger children and I felt like busy didn't even begin to describe it, I was at a Sunday Mass. I had a big belly and a big toddler and a big preschooler and a few squirmy bigger kids and about one who could sit still during Mass.

My toddler (who by the way was the Chicken Whisperer) was climbing over my belly (who by the way was Huckleberry) and poking the Professor and asking Why? while he rubbed his hand over my face and tried to lift up my dress to see my belly.  He was (and still is) cute as the dickens but I was feeling pretty frazzled.

I was distracted leading up to the Consecration, and when I heard the bells ring, Father was holding the Chalice up.  A light was swirling swiftly around it.  Around and around.  Then a voice in my brain said, "this is My Body."  Then the swirling light came toward me, swiftly, swiftly it engulfed my toddler and swirled around his body, squirming and restless.  And the voice again said, "this is My Body."

And I knew that my vocation was so much more than caring for my own flesh and blood, but His flesh and blood.  And I knew that my vocation was a high calling.  And I knew that all the tenderness I pour out onto my children I pour out onto Him.  

And if I hurt them, I hurt Him. And if I am tender with them, I am tender with Him.

Ah.  It still send shivers down my spine to think on it.

"And the king answering, shall say to them: Amen I say to you, as long as you did it to one of these my least brethren, you did it to me."