One morning recently, I was running along the trail in Westville’s Edgewood Park on my return from the Yale Track. It was the third in a string of beautiful, crisp fall mornings, and I was taking it all in—the damp grass, the Canadian geese, a couple other runners out there. It was cool enough to see my breath. I felt like I was flying.

The mile split from my Garmin watch, which happened to be working this morning (I always get excited and grateful when it works for me now), showed that I was flying (for me). And I wandered where this was coming from. What made this morning different? I realized that it was the one morning of the week when I celebrate the 7AM Mass at Saint Stanislaus Church. Mass had finished just under an hour ago, and the Body and Blood of Christ was still in my body. I thought about Hans Urs Von Balthazar’s extended meditation on one of Jesus’s seven “I am” statements in John’s Gospel from his book, Heart of the World:

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Two lives become visible, and yet they are but one. The raw material is always the same, only brought together in new ways by the combinations of organic life, and, to the very marrow of Being, this material has become still more noble. So it is that you live, but no longer you; rather, it is I who live in you. For this reason you are my possession, my fruit, my branches. You no longer belong to yourselves; you have become the Temple of God.

You have blossomed forth from me. Are you then surprised if a drop of my Heart’s blood trickles into your every thought and deed? Are you surprised if the thoughts of my Heart quietly infiltrate your worldly heart? If a whispering takes wing in you and day and night you perceive a low, beckoning call?”

When you exercise, adrenaline levels rise, which stimulates the heart to beat faster. Capillaries in the muscles open wider, increasing blood flow there by up to 20 times. Blood flow is greater when you run because the blood vessels in your muscles dilate. So, while all that was happening, Christ’s blood was pumping through my veins. I realized that what I was feeling was Jesus living in me, running in and through me. Feeling fully alive and at full stride I was experiencing God fully alive in me.