Mutual desiring and indwelling is the intended impact of the Eucharist. We know that Jesus often referred to himself as the “bridegroom” (John 3:29; Matthew 9:15), and one of his first recorded acts of ministry was partying at a wedding feast (John 2:1-11), creating 150 gallons of intoxicating wine out of dutiful waters of purification! We also know that the very erotic Song of Songs somehow made its way into the Bible, and its images of union have been precious to mystics from the earliest centuries. Yet much of later Christianity has been rather prudish and ashamed of the human body, which God took on so happily through Jesus and then gave away to us so freely in the Eucharist.
The Eucharist is an encounter of the heart, knowing Presence through our own offered presence. In the Eucharist, we move beyond mere words or rational thought and go to that place where we don’t talk about the Mystery anymore; we begin to chew on it. Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”
We must move our knowing to the bodily, cellular, participative, and thus unitive level. We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it dawns on us, in an undefended moment, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also am the Body of Christ.” Then we can trust and allow what has been true since the first moment of our existence. We have dignity and power flowing through us in our bare and naked existence—and everybody else does too, even though most do not know it. A body awareness of this sort is enough to steer and empower our entire faith life, while merely assenting to or saying the words will never give us the jolt we need to absorb the divine desire for us.
This is why I must hold to the orthodox belief that there is Real Presence in the bread and wine. For me, if we sacrifice Reality in the elements, we end up sacrificing the same Reality in ourselves.
The Eucharist is Christians’ ongoing touchstone for the spiritual journey, a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face, our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are forever. We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!
Read these familiar words, perhaps inspired by Teresa of Ávila (1515–1582), aloud a couple times and let its message sink in to your marrow:
Christ has no body now, but yours. No hands, no feet on earth, but yours. Yours are the eyes through which Christ looks compassion into the world. Yours are the feet with which Christ walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which Christ blesses the world.
As if eating his body weren’t enough, Jesus pushes us in even further and scarier directions by adding the symbolism of intoxicating wine as he lifts the cup and speaks over all of suffering humanity, “This is my blood.” Jesus then dares to say, “Drink me, all of you!” It’s utterly scandalous language that has been domesticated by overhearing.
During Jesus’ time, contact with blood would typically mean ritual impurity for a Jew. How daring and shocking it was for Jesus to turn the whole tradition of impure blood upside down and make blood holy! And what an affirmation of the divine image within women—whose menstruation was often considered unclean.
One of the things I’ve learned from studying male initiation rites around the world is that startling, vivid rituals can have great psychic effect. Some examples of these rituals include symbolic drowning, digging one’s own grave, marking with ashes, and even the now outdated slap that bishops used to give at Confirmation—all intended to shock us into realization.
There’s a real difference between mere ceremonies and life-changing rituals, as my friend Fr. Jim Clarke taught me. [1] Ceremonies normally confirm and celebrate the status quo and avoid the shadow side of things. For example, on July 4 in the United States, we celebrate Independence Day with fireworks and parades to show we’re “proud to be an American,” while never acknowledging colonists’ genocide of Indigenous Peoples, the enslavement of Africans, how our over-consumption has contributed to planetary devastation, and other ways our “freedom” has cost others. We are not allowed to note these things without being considered unpatriotic or even rebellious. True sacred ritual is different than mere ceremony because it offers an alternative universe, where the shadow is named and drawn into the light. Sadly, most groups avoid real life-changing and healing rituals—even the church.
While many Eucharistic or communion services usually seem rote and ceremonial, being fully present to its symbolism can and should startle us. While the experience of eating Jesus’ body and blood can be comforting, it should also be deeply discomforting. Many mystics and liberation theologians have recognized that by inviting us to drink wine as his blood, Jesus is calling us to live in bodily solidarity “with the blood of every person whose blood has been unjustly shed on this earth, from the blood of Abel the Holy to the blood of Zechariah” (Matthew 23:35). These are the first and last murders noted in the Hebrew Bible. In the act of drinking the blood of Christ at this Holy Meal, we are consciously uniting with all unjust suffering in the world, from the beginning of time till its end. Wherever there was and is suffering, there is the empathy and healing justice of God—and we are joining with God insofar as we can. “This is all my blood!” Jesus is saying and we are agreeing.
I can see why Christians celebrate the Eucharist so often. This message is such a shock to the psyche, such a challenge to our pride and individualism, that it takes a lifetime of practice and much vulnerability for it to sink in—as the pattern of every thing, not just the bread and wine. Every thing is in Christ and Christ is in every thing. There is only one suffering, and it is the suffering of God. There is only one love, and it is all the love of God.
As I shared earlier, the prologue to John’s Gospel gives us a wonderful vision of the Christ Mystery. [1] John uses the word Logos, which I take to mean blueprint. It is the inner pattern of reality, revealed in Jesus and in creation. Let’s take a closer look:
In the beginning was the blueprint. The blueprint was with God. The blueprint was God. And all things came to be through this inner plan. [The inner reality of God is manifest in the outer material world. That is why we can consider creation to be the Body of God.] No one thing came to be except through this blueprint and plan. All that came to be had life in him. [Now it’s become personalized: in him, in Jesus. So, this great universal mystery since the beginning of time now becomes specific in the body and the person of Jesus. The blueprint has become personified and visible.] And that life was the light of humanity (John 1: 1-3).
At the Last Supper, when Jesus held up the bread and spoke the words “This is my Body,” I believe he was speaking not just about the bread right in front of him, but about the whole universe, about every thing that is physical, material, and yet also spirit-filled. His assertion and Christians’ repetition resound over all creation before they also settle into one piece of bread to be shared. The bread and wine, and all of creation, seem to believe who and what they are much more readily than humans do. They know they are the Body of Christ, even if many Homo sapiensresist and even deny such a thought. When celebrants speak these sacred words at the altar, they are speaking them to both the bread and the congregation—so they can carry it “to all of creation” (Mark 16:16). As St. Augustine (354–430 CE) preached, we must feed the Body of Christ to the people of God until they know that they are what they eat! [2]
Wealso are the Body of Christ, as is all of the universe. The Apostle Paul used a perfect metaphor: “As a body is one though it has many parts, and all the parts of the body, though many, are one body, so also Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slaves or free persons, and we were all given to drink of one Spirit. . . . Now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it” (1 Corinthians 12:12-13, 27). I love to think of every flowing stream, every waterfall, and every river as “baptizing” the physical universe, washing away its inability to know how glorious it is. (Read a few Mary Oliver poems if you want to get the same message.)
Christ is the eternal amalgam of matter and spirit as one. They hold and reveal one another. Wherever the human and the divine coexist, we have the Christ. Wherever the material and the spiritual coincide, we have the Christ. That includes the material world, the natural world, the animal world (including humans), and moves all the way to the elemental world, symbolized by bread and wine. The Eucharist just offers Christians the message in very condensed form so we can struggle with it in a specific and concrete way. We cannot think about such a universal truth logically; we can only slowly digest it! It is the spiritual version of healthy eating and nutrition.
Only gradually does the truth become believable. Finally, the Body of Christ is not out there or over there; it’s in you—it’s here and now and everywhere. The goal is then to move beyond yourself and recognize that what’s true in you is true in all others too. This was supposed to spark a political and social revolution. But Christians wasted centuries arguing about whether it could even be true and how it might be true. The orthodox insistence on “Real Presence” is merely taking the Mystery of Incarnation to its natural, full, and very good conclusion. Here I am quite happy to be traditionally Catholic. “There is only Christ, he is everything, and he is in everything,” Paul shouts (see Colossians 3:11). This is not pantheism; it is the much more subtle and subversive panentheism, or God in all things. (The only trouble with our Catholic belief in “transubstantiation” is that this explanation smacked of pantheism, whereas panentheism would have been much easier to defend and understand.)
You and I are living here in this ever-expanding universe. You and I are a part of this Christ Mystery without any choice on our part. We just are, whether we like it or not. It’s nothing we have to consciously believe, although that sure helps and seems to accelerate the enjoyment. Incarnation is first of all announcing an objective truth. If we consciously take this mystery as our worldview, it will create a deep contentment and inherent dignity in those who trust it. It gives us all significance and a sense of belonging as part of God’s Great Work—no exceptions. We are no longer alienated from God, others, or the universe. Everything belongs from the beginning. And it has always been pure, undeserved gift. The utter gratuity of it all is what we cannot comprehend!
Participating in Christ allows me to know that I don’t matter at all, and yet I matter intensely—at the same time! That’s the ultimate therapeutic healing. I’m just a little grain of sand in this giant, giant universe. I’m going to pass from this form in a little while, just like everyone else will. But I’m also a child of God and part of the eternal Body of Christ. I’m connected radically, inherently, intrinsically to the Center and to everything else. I call this “ontological holiness” as opposed to the moral holiness most of us were taught and inside of which no one really succeeds.
To legitimate our religion’s status in the Roman Empire, Christians felt that we had to prove that Jesus was independently divine. After the Council of Nicaea (325), Jesus was said to be “consubstantial” with God, and after the Council of Chalcedon (451), the church agreed on a philosophical definition of Jesus’ humanity and divinity as being united as one in him. All true, but such oneness largely remained distant academic theory because we did not draw out the practical and wonderful implications for humanity.
As a rule, Christians were more interested in the superiority of our own group or nation than we were in the wholeness of creation. Our view of reality was largely imperial, patriarchal, and dualistic. Things were seen as either for us or against us, and we were either winners or losers, totally good or totally bad—such a small self and its personal salvation remained Christianity’s overwhelming preoccupation up to now. This is surely how our religion became so focused on obedience and conformity, instead of on love in any practical or expanding sense.
Without a Shared and Big Story, all humans retreat into private individualism for a bit of sanity and safety.
Perhaps the primary example of Christians’ lack of attention to the Christ Mystery can be seen in the way we continue to pollute and ravage planet Earth, the very thing we all stand on and live from. Science now appears to love and respect physicality more than most religion does! No wonder that science and business have taken over as the major explainers of meaning for most people today (even many who still go to church). Christians did not take this world seriously, I am afraid, because our notion of God or salvation didn’t include or honor the physical universe. And now, I am afraid, the world does not take Christianity seriously.
Hope cannot be had by the individual if everything is corporately hopeless.
It is hard to heal individuals when the whole thing is seen as unhealable.
We are still trying to paddle our way out of this whirlpool—with a very small paddle! Only with a notion of the Preexisting Christ can we recover where this Jesus was “coming from” and where he is leading us—which is precisely into the “bosom of the Trinity” (see John 1:18). “I shall return to take you with me, so that where I am you also may be” (John 14:3), the Christ has promised. That might just be the best and most succinct description of salvation in the whole New Testament.
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