God won’t be lived like some light morning/ Whoever climbs down the shaft must give up/ earth’s repleteness for the craft of mining:/ stand hunched and pry him loose in tunnels. - Rainer Rilke -
“The Sacraments produce the grace that they signify,” said Blessed Columba Marmion in one of his talks on the Eucharist. He goes on to compare this with our everyday world showing how the heavenly bread of the Holy Eucharist preserves, sustains, nourishes, restores us as much as other food we take into our bodies. The Eucharist, however, has the added dimension of nourishing, increasing and restoring the life of grace in the soul because, as Blessed Columba Marmion shows, it gives us not something, but someone, the very Author of Grace, Jesus Christ.
This divine life, Marmion tells us, “can enter us by other doors, but it is by Holy Communion that it inundates our souls like a river in flood.” While bringing us divine life, the Eucharist is also a mystery of faith because we can not perceive the deepest reality of what is in front of us. To penetrate, and believe in this sublime, but hidden, reality of the bread and wine brought forward, truly becoming the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus after the words of consecration, is an act of faith. To approach communion and receive this august sacrament, Blessed Columba sees as a “statement of faith of the largest kind,...for not only intellect makes an act of faith; it is our whole being that translates this act into practice by our approaching the altar.”
As much as the divine life is flowing through us via the Holy Eucharist, not being able to see beyond the veil of perception and go by faith alone, can bring about moments of doubt and questioning. How can we penetrate that veil a little to ‘see’ beyond what our senses say are still simply bread and wine? Enter a morning car-line conversation with Mrs. Coe (6th grade mum) a couple weeks after her mum’s passing. She was relaying how at times in those first weeks after her mum had died how hard it was to process and keep up with all that had happened. How hard it was to completely grasp the full reality of her mum no longer being here. Her expressing what she was going through brought back memories of what I experienced when my husband died. My mind, not unlike what Sheri was describing, could not process all at once what had happened, the changes that had then come about. Even though at any given moment I, like Sheri, could tell you my loved one had died, it still took several months for my intellect to catch up, so to speak, with the deepest reality of what had taken place.
Our two shared experiences made me comment to her how this was like accepting the new reality of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, even when our minds balk and want to say it’s still just bread and wine. Just as we had to struggle and adapt our thinking to a new reality with the passing of our loved ones, so too, our minds struggle to adapt and adjust to the reality of the change in the bread and wine at Mass. After some time our minds, our intellect, are able to accept that our loved one is gone, but experiencing completely the reality of the change in the bread and wine into our merciful Saviour is so great that we simply won’t achieve it in this life. We take must take it on faith, and at times, use experiences like what Sheri and I have gone through, to help us believe in the deeper event of the change that has taken place in the consecrated Host and Precious Blood. We must put our faith in Jesus, that what he says has happened, has indeed happened: This is my body...this is my blood…(Matthew 26: 27-28). Christ is living in me. I still have my human life, but it is a life of faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me (Galatians 2:20). Jesus is the Bread of Life, may our faith live in his life.
I’ve linked to Tower Music as another way to show how you can look at something in a way you may not have looked at before, and see something you hadn’t seen before. As a visual artist and writer I’ve looked at the Eiffel Tower through these eyes, looking at it’s shape, color, design, etc. and interpreting that into poems and collages. Not being very musical I’ve never stared at a picture of the Eiffel Tower and said, “big musical instrument.” That, however, is what someone did, and created a musical composition from sounds made using the tower as his instrument. Seeing, or in this case, hearing, things in a way you weren’t expecting is what faith asks us to do. Enjoy a thousand feet of sound - see bottom link.
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist by Brant Pitre (ISBN 978 385 53184 9) is a nicely readable book that will give you a greater understanding and appreciation for the Eucharist.
- One of the first things I do whenever I come to a new big city is to get myself a street map...Not only does a map show me how to get from place to place, but it also shows me specific, potentially interesting features and sights which I might otherwise have missed—the location of markets, rail terminals, the harbor and docks, parks and beaches, public buildings, bridges, monuments and so on. Furthermore, since any map shows the points of the compass, it lets me know when specific streets or buildings will be in the sun and when in shade, and the hours when I can expect to encounter the raking sunlight I may need to bring out the relief in the façade of a certain building or the backlight that creates the glitter of sun on water. And finally, a street map helps me to pinpoint my photographs in relation to the city as a whole and aids me in captioning my shots. - Andreas Feininger -
Faith is the map that gets us from the profane to the spiritual.
This link is to a version of the Suzanne Toolan song I Am the Bread of Life. Unfortunately we don't have a recording of our wonderful school choir singing this song, so I had to look elsewhere.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YNWZwcM3gMM
20 May 2016