Being Present to Real Presence

It has been said that the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[1] While the doctrine of the Real Presence is a touchstone of Catholic orthodoxy, I think that if we’re not careful we can miss something critically important about our experience of Eucharist in daily life.

Franciscan priest Richard Rohr notes:

After defending and believing the Real Presence all my life, I recognize that the concept of presence is inherently and necessarily relational. Catholics can defend the Doctrine of the Real Presence all we want, and I do, but if we don’t teach the children of God how to be present to presence, there is no Real Presence.[2]

Rohr is not suggesting that Christ’s real body and blood are absent from the Eucharist. Rather he is suggesting that we are the ones who are absent from the Real Presence of Christ, that our experience of Eucharist is intimately related to our personal disposition, or, in other words, our willingness to be “present to presence.”

This idea makes it particularly exciting to share this next story. It is a story about a beautiful confluence of presence – the ministry of presence in Young Life and the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. This story comes from Nathan Gunn, a faithful Catholic, dear friend and Young Life colleague of mine from Syracuse, New York[3]. Nathan shares his experience of being present to the Real Presence of the Eucharist this summer at Young Life camp:

We experienced an extraordinary gift this month at Saranac Village, a Young Life camp in upstate New York.  Through the generosity of Msgr. Yeazel at Holy Cross Church, we were able to have the Eucharist available each Sunday morning for our Assignment Team, Camp Staff, Work Crew and Summer Staff.  As we put the communion service on the schedule Week 1, it seemed unlikely that many people would get up early to participate with the opportunity.  Were we ever surprised!  Folks began arriving early, just to enjoy the quiet of the club room as we waited to enjoy His presence.   The service was short and intimate - but those of us who were able to commune together were able to build quick bonds.

The mere presence of the Eucharist in camp spurred scores and scores of wonderful conversations around camp.  Walking through the bakery, down at the Outpost, in the living room of the Guide House, people were having deep conversations about the presence of Jesus in their own lives.  Several young Catholics stopped to tell me how healing the Eucharist was for them.  Enjoying the fellowship around the Presence of the Lord was incredible healing.

Each week grew a bit until our final Sunday morning during Wyldlife camp.  Since our middle school friends and their leaders were away from their parishes for camp, we offered the communion service on the schedule for campers as well.  Again, this service was optional and something that people would have needed to sacrifice in order to be present.  Our hearts were warmed when over fifty people gathered for the communion.  Our prayers together for the campers and the week ahead were inspirational.  Our reverent pause before Jesus and His Love was a personal highlight for me.  Sharing the peace with kids from multiple areas is an experience none of us are soon to forget.  We can only imagine the positive ripple effect as kids return home and tell their parents that YL had made the Eucharist available to them.

Jesus never stops surprising me.  The promise of His presence in our lives is our daily hope.  To bring the Eucharist into this setting was an experience that was not only transformative but revelatory - we promise kids Jesus, what could be better!

Nathan, wife Tammy, and two boys.

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[1] Lumen Gentium (Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 11.

[2] Richard Rohr, Dancing Standing Still (NY: Paulist Press, 2014), 15.

[3] Nathan Gunn is a Catholic who has served the mission of Young Life for over 18 years. He currently serves as a Metro Area Director for Syracuse, NY and Regional Field Developer for the Central New York Region. He lives with his wife, Tammy, and two strapping boys in Syracuse.

The Eucharist: A Sign of Unity and Division

The following post was written by my dear friend and theological interlocutor, Andre Lesperance[1]:

Early in the fall semester each year I ask my new crop of students what they would do if they knew they only had 24 hours to live.  This happens to be quite the effective icebreaker.  The question, if taken seriously, is a window into our most important values, desires, fears and hopes.

The question also sets up one of our first units of study.  Jesus so happens to be someone who knew his death was imminent.  What did he do in his last hours?  How did he choose to spend his time?

The answer, according to the four Gospels, is that he hosted a dinner with his closest friends.  Yet the goal of this dinner was not merely to cling to the past or relish their few remaining moments together.  Jesus was laying out a plan for the road ahead.  He “took bread, and after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.”[2]  After the death and resurrection of Jesus, the early Christian community would experience how the presence of the risen Christ “was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”[3] 

It is unfortunate that the very ritual given by Jesus in his last hours to foster unity and strength for mission among his followers has been the subject of countless debates and divisions.  This is not to deny the real and important theological issues at stake, of course. Such heated debates at least testify to the importance of Jesus’ words and actions, as his followers struggle to understand them as best they can.

Yet aren’t the times ripe for building bridges once again where reformation-era debates have left gaping holes and wounded hearts?

At a lived pastoral level, we could start bridge building by suspending our initial assumptions about the other’s theology of the bread and the wine. As a Catholic, I know that those in my own tradition can often be guilty of such presumption—as I have been at times.  Since Catholicism most boldly asserts the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, we can all too easily assume every other church’s belief to be merely a symbolic remembering of the past.

On the other hand, perhaps Protestants can all too easily dismiss the Catholic view of the Eucharist as superstitious, divorced from the fundamentals of a heart surrendered to God.  And yet, how many Catholics corroborate this impression by their silent anti-witness of a life untransformed by Jesus, while remaining faithful—even adamant—in their adherence to weekly communion?  Indeed, it would seem that for many of us Catholics, the words of Jesus to Philip would equally apply to ourselves: “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me?” (John 14:9).

While I stand in full communion with the Catholic Church and happily assent to all of its teachings on the Eucharist, I find it crucial to approach with reverence and often silence the various Protestant attitudes toward the bread and the wine.  As a starting point for doing so, as well as for navigating some of the tensions between liberals and conservatives within Catholicism, I find the following excerpt from Fr. Ronald Rolheiser immensely helpful.  It captures some of the magnitude of this beautiful mystery that we cannot reduce to exclusive territorial skirmishes. Rolheiser reflects,

There are lots of views on the Eucharist:

·      For some it is a meal, for others it is a sacrifice

·      For some it is a ritual act, sacred and set apart, for others it is a community gathering, the more mess and kids there the better.

·      For some it is a deep personal prayer, for others it is a communal worship for the world.

·      For some its very essence is a coming together, a communion, of those united in a single denominational faith, while for others part of its essence is its reaching out, its innate imperative to wash the feet of those who are different from ourselves.

·      For some it is a celebration of sorrow, a making present of Christ’s suffering and thus the place where we can break down, for others it is the place to celebrate joy and sing alleluia.

·      For some it is a ritual remembrance, a making present of the historical events of Jesus’ dying, rising, ascending, and sending the Holy Spirit, for others it is a celebration of God’s presence with us today.

·      For some it is a celebration of the Last Supper, something to be done less frequently, for others it is God’s daily feeding of his people with a new manna, Christ’s body, and is something to be done every day.

·      For some it is a celebration of reconciliation, a ritual that forgives and unites, for others unity and reconciliation are pre-conditions for its proper celebration…

·      For some it is understood to make present the real, physical body of Christ, for others it is understood to make Christ present in a real but spiritual way.

·      Some call it the Lord’s Supper, others call it the Eucharist, others call it the Mass.

Who’s right? In truth, the Eucharist is all of these things, and more. It is like a finely-cut diamond twirling in the sun, every turn giving off a different sparkle. It is multivalent, carrying different layers of meaning, some of them in paradoxical tension with others…

There is no adequate explanation of the Eucharist for the same reason that, in the end, there is no adequate explanation for love, for embrace, and for the reception of life and spirit through touch. Certain realities take us beyond language because that is their very purpose. They do what words cannot do. They also are beyond what we can neatly nail down in our understanding.

And that is true of the Eucharist. Any attempt to nail down its full meaning will forever come up short because it will always eventually get up and walk away with the nail![4]

What does the bread and the wine mean to you?

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[1] Andre Lesperance teaches theology at Marquette University High School in Milwaukee, Wisconsin where he lives with his wife, Jackie, and three beautiful children.

[2] 1 Cor 11:24

[3] Luke 24:35

[4] Ronald Rolheiser, “The Many Faces of the Eucharist,” accessed on June 10, 2013 at http://www.ronrolheiser.com/columnarchive/?id=410

Merton on the Mass

It isn’t very difficult to see that Merton has something quite pointed to say in this story (see my last post on The Art of Missing the Forest for the Trees).  On the surface, it would seem that the primary issue is racial equality and integration (keep in mind Merton told this story in the full tumult of the 1960s).  Yet Merton chose to direct his commentary toward the true lightening rod of the narrative: the Eucharist.  The churchgoers were so incensed by the priest’s sermon that they left prior to receiving the Eucharist, the body of Christ, the “source and summit of the Christian life.”[1]  Thus we have the consternated words of warning hurled at the priest as the offended parishioner stormed out, “If I miss Mass today it’s your fault!”

There is an implication of guilt and punishment here.  The parting parishioner assumes that there will be a penalty to pay because he was not able to partake in the Eucharistic meal.  For those Catholic readers, the guilt of moral obligation will already be ringing in your ears.  Yet in a beautiful turn of parody, Merton uses this very idea of judgment in his response:

 Not only do we see in these men a flat refusal to listen to the plain meaning of the word of God. . . there is also a complete moral and spiritual insensitivity to the meaning of the Mass as the Christian Agape, the union of brothers in Christ, a union from which no believer is to be excluded.  To exclude a brother in Christ from this union is to fail to “judge the Body of Christ” and hence to “eat and drink judgment to oneself.” (1 Corinthians)[2]

The proverbial forest missed in Merton’s provocative story is nothing short of Christ and the kingdom of shalom which Christ so insistently preached, a kingdom which, projected into the 1960s, envisioned “little black boys and girls holding hands with little white boys and girls,” to quote Martin Luther King, Jr.  Eucharist is not a private ritual for personal sanctification.  It is the real presence of God with the power to mobilize the people of God to build a civilization of love.  That civilization is marked by reconciliation, right relationship, wholeness and justice. “The ritual action of Eucharist is powerful when it is allowed to penetrate the life and action of the people, and transform them into an effective embodiment of the love that is God, a sacrament of his presence.”[3]   There is an essential relationship between ritual, especially sacramental ritual as momentous as the Eucharist, and the lived realities of human beings which serve as primary witnesses to Christ’s presence among us.

I’ll let Merton get the last word, but I pray that we, the whole body of Christ, will take this universal meaning into our own lives and religious practice.

Is not their attendance at Mass a legal formality?  Formalities, abstractions, are not enough.  Gestures of conformity do not make a man a Christian, and when one’s actual conduct obviously belies the whole meaning of the gesture, it is an objective statement that one’s Christianity has lost it’s meaning.[4]

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[1]             Lumen Gentium (The Dogmatic Constitution on the Church), 11.

[2]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105.

[3]             Mary Peter McGinty, The Sacrament of Christian Life, Chicago, IL: The Thomas More Press, 1992, 50.

[4]             Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander, NY: DoubleDay, 1966, 105-106.