This is my body, given for you. These are words spoken at every Mass every day of every year. Words that are so familiar we hardly grasp their meaning anymore. My body. Given up. For You. My physical strength, my flesh, my life. Given for you.

When Christ spoke these words, he uttered them the night he would be arrested and taken to be crucified. He knew what would befall him. And he knew clearly who he was doing it for. But he spoke them as he held up the bread, having blessed it and broken it and he offered it to his disciple to eat. This is my body, given for you.

It has taken me years to realize, but as a mother, I begin to more deeply understand the love within the Eucharist. I have nursed each one of my children. I have fed them with my own body and with my own strength. I have carried each of them nine months, stretched my skin to its limits, taken my muscles to the brink of utter exhaustion. When they were newborns, I depleted my physical energy through sleepless nights and tireless days as I worked to sustain my child’s life. My hormones, my postpartum mental health, my emotional strength, all broken for them. I have given my body for them.

Even my husband does this, in a way. He works tirelessly as a farmer, spending long hours in a hot, humid barn working on equipment or sleeping less than five hours a night during harvest as he works to bring the crops in. He gives up his body, through his work, to provide for his children and bring them nourishment and life.

This is my body, given for you. What an epic expression of love.

Literature is full of tales of the ultimate sacrifice–those giving their last breaths to save another. But Christ’s sacrifice is even more than that–his sacrifice is sustaining.

You see, every time we participate in the Eucharist, we are given life anew. His sacrifice transcends time and his body nourishes us, both physically and spiritually. I could discuss a ton of evidence that Christ literally meant we would “eat his flesh and drink his blood,” (John 6), but, as a convert explained to me years ago, many people want to know why? Why would Christ give himself to us to eat?

When we go to Mass, we are taken back to the foot of the Cross. His final sacrifice is made present to us through all eternity, in the Mass. As the priest lifts the host–what looks like a simple wafer, broken–and says “This is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world,” we are there, present, at the moment all humankind was saved. And in that moment, Christ gives himself to us as our nourishment, our very sustenance, like the paschal lamb that was sacrificed at the Passover and given to the Israelites to eat.

Just as a mother nurses her child with the food of her body, Christ feeds us with the sacrifice of his body. This isn’t just about giving up his life that we might live; it is about strengthening our soul as he gives himself to us in every Mass. While he does not sacrifice himself again and again, he is able to make his sacrifice present to us, outside of time, that we may witness his great love for us. We consume him so that we may become like him.

How beautiful we have a God that became incarnate. How beautiful our Creator, who gave us both a body and a spirit, deigned to dignify that physical body so much that he made one for himself. He does not ask us to neglect our physical body in favor of our spirit. He does not wish us to focus on only the intellectual, the rational, the emotional. No, he meets us through our physical body, the one that he created, using it to express the spiritual.

Moms, the next time you feel your body wearing out as you care for your children, remember the Eucharist. Remember the Bread of Life as you nurse your babies or tear your bone-weary body from the bed to prepare a bottle. As you stand in front of the stove, one person expected to prepare food for your entire family, remember Christ. Nourish the bodies of others around you by pouring from your own, and know that Christ is still, and always will be, sustaining you.