Today is Corpus Christi, the solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, the feast of the sacrament of the Eucharist. What do these words mean? At their Greek roots, "Eucharist" means "thanksgiving," and "sacrament" means "mystery." Let us give thanks for the Eucharist, without reducing the Mystery to the small things that our reason can encompass.
I start by saying: right religion is a relationship between a person and God, and between a people and God, between creatures and their Creator. It is not an institution. It's not a book, or a story, or traditions. It's not ritual. It's not a system of rules to live by. It's not a building, or a tabernacle built into the wall. Without the Love of God, that's just a club, not a church. Then again, without those things, there's just vague "spirituality," not religion. Right religion does include all those things, but as structure and practices to support the loving relationship, as forms of communication between God and each human being, and between God and the human community.
So what does the Eucharist mean to me? It's all about LOVE. Everything, with God, is all about Love. The Eucharist is God's free gift of Himself to us, in love. He is incarnate anew every day, not in human flesh this time, but as food and drink for our own human flesh. He comes to become one with us, to commingle His self with our selves, in the sacrament.
He came 2000 years ago, and joined His divinity to our humanity by becoming a man, Jesus Christ. Today God comes again, daily, and joins His divinity to us by becoming food to be incorporated into our mortal bodies. And as God is limitless, boundless, we who are so divinized are also bound to one another in that shared bond. Not only we communicants, as Christ bound the whole human race to God by becoming man Himself. But there is an intimacy and immediacy to the sacrament in taking that little morsel of God, incarnate here and now under the form of bread, into my mouth, consuming it, taking it into my body.
Jesus came to die. He came into this world as a helpless infant. Eventually he was betrayed, he was tortured, he was lynched. And in his death, he defeated death. In the Sacrament, Christ comes as a little scrap of bread, to be chewed up and swallowed. He makes Himself so small and humble for us. His daily-incarnate body and blood are always vulnerable to desecration: not only the gross desecration of those who would vandalize a tabernacle, but the small daily mockery of our distraction, of our tepidity, of our forgetting to be awed and grateful for the gift. But in that little bite of bread, He shares with us mortals His life, that is undefeated by death.
He doesn't make himself small and weak and vulnerable because he's a masochist. He does it because we are small, and weak, and vulnerable. He does it because he loves us, infinitely, unconditionally, a bottomless well of Love. And he wants communion with us. We can never love Him as much as He loves us. The tedium of daily repetition dulls our appreciation of the wonder of God's loving gift of Himself. But He is always there, always new, always beautiful, always tender, and that little scrap of bread is always filled, filled with the glory and brilliance of the Almighty, made small for His beloved people.
God is, in Himself, transcendant, infinite, eternal. We are, in ourselves, small, bounded by space and time, limited in our perception and understanding, mortal. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, God gives us the ability to participate in His divinity. With the gift of the Eucharist, He comes to participate with us in our humanity.
This is the wedding feast: in the Eucharist, God and His beloved human creatures become one flesh. You are what you eat! If we eat God, we are truly changed. We could say: at Pentecost, at our Confirmation, we become one Spirit with Him; at the Mass He becomes one flesh with us. This is the basis for mystical union. This is the seed of theosis.
At Communion I sometimes look around the church, look at the people returning to their seats, and I think: “they are all transformed, they have all partaken of God.” We who have partaken of the Eucharist, we are all joined as one mystical Body in the Body of Christ, as one Spirit in his Spirit. It's hard to grasp that with our ordinary, everyday, left-brain thinking. The Catechism tells us it's so, but do we really believe it? Can we suspend rational disbelief, even partially, and let ourselves be carried away by the wonder of the depth and intimacy of the gift of God's loving presence within and among us?
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