Tag Archives: COVID-19

Longing to Receive the Eucharist

We are getting closer to being able to gather together to worship God and receive the Eucharist, an oasis glimpsed on the horizon. 

Technology is truly amazing. Had this pandemic struck a generation ago, we would not have been able to “live stream” our church attendance, and our separation from the Mass would have been that much more complete. Still, even with all of our high-tech access, there is no substitute for Jesus Himself in the Sacraments.

Some commentators fear that many people simply won’t return to Mass once the restrictions are lifted. This fear is not unreasonable. Recent bombshell polls revealed widespread ignorance among self-professed Catholics of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. https://cruxnow.com/news-analysis/2019/08/new-survey-only-one-third-of-catholics-believe-in-real-presence/  This cuts to the very heart of the Faith.

To view the Sacraments – especially the Eucharist – as mere “symbols” is, I believe, to miss the essential point about who Jesus is in relation to God’s covenant with Israel. He is, in every way, the FULFILLMENT of what came before. (For example, “’Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill'” Mt 5:17; “Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to [the disciples on the road to Emmaus] what referred to him in all the scriptures” Lk 24:27.) And, if that is the case, then the actions He commands – “do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19; 1 Cor 11:24); “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” (Mt 28:19) – are likewise greater than what prefigured them.

The Eucharist is greater than manna, but manna is a prefiguring type of the Eucharist. Jesus specifically associates Himself with the manna that sustained the Israelites in the wilderness (Ex 16): “‘I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;  this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.'” Jn 6:48-50. In roughly the year 387, St. Ambrose of Milan explained to his catechumens that the manna was the symbol which pointed forward to the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist:

All this took place as a symbol for us. You know now what is more excellent: light is preferable to its shadow, reality to its symbol, the body of the Giver to the manna he gave from heaven.

https://www.crossroadsinitiative.com/media/articles/eucharisttruebodyofchristheavenlymanna/ To consider the Eucharist to be a mere symbol is actually to make it even less than the manna (which, after all, provided much of the Israelites’ daily sustenance).

As with manna, so, too, with the Passover lamb, which God commanded the Israelites to sacrifice and consume every year to commemorate their redemption from Egypt. Ex 12:26-27. Scripture tells us the Eucharist was instituted by Christ at Passover. (Mt 26; Mk 14; Lk 22.) We know Jesus is “the Lamb of God.” Jn 1:36. As Scott Hahn asks, 

But what does this mean to us today? How should we celebrate our Passover? St. Paul gives us a clue: “Christ, our paschal lamb, has been sacrificed. Let us, therefore, celebrate the festival . . . with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth” (1 Cor. 5:7-8). Our Passover lamb, then, is unleavened bread. Our festival is the Mass (see 1 Cor 10:15-21; 11:23-32). [ ¶ ] In the clear light of the New Covenant, the Old Covenant sacrifices make sense as preparation for the one sacrifice of Jesus Christ, our royal high priest in the heavenly sanctuary.

[. . .]

It is not enough that Christ bled and died for our sake. Now we have our part to play. As with the Old Covenant, so with the New. If you want to mark your covenant with God, to seal your covenant with God, to renew your covenant with God, you have to eat the Lamb –the paschal lamb Who is our unleavened bread. It begins to sound familiar. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink His blood, you have no life in you” (Jn 6:54).

Scott Hahn, The Lamb’s Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth 25, 26 (Doubleday 1999) (italics in original). No longer simply a commemoration, nor just physical nourishment, the Passover lamb of the New Covenant is Jesus’ gift of His own body and blood, a sharing in His supernatural life.

***

It would be tragic for anyone to walk away from such an astonishing gift.

The following anecdote sums things up well.

Once, in the late 1940s or early 1950s, the author Flannery O’Connor was a guest at a dinner party with the author Mary McCarthy, a former Catholic. O’Connor related the ensuing conversation in a letter to a friend:

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater [Mary McCarthy] said when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest is expendable.

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/20417/pdf

The Catechism states (¶ 1392) that the Eucharist “preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism.” Baptism is also more than a symbol, and I will try to delve further into that topic in a later post.

Gilbert and Joni

I’m still making my way through In Defense of Sanity, a collection of essays by G.K. Chesterton. Today’s essay is “On Being Moved,” wherein the process of moving house, and having his belongings carried away around him as he tries to write, prompts him to meditate on death, deprivation, and gratitude:

In the end the dim beneficent powers will take the cosmos to pieces all round me, as my house is being taken to pieces now. . . . I go back to my writing table; at least I do not exactly go back to it, because they have taken it away, with silent treachery, while I was meditating on death at the window.

His chair remains:

I feel strangely grateful to the noble wooden quadruped on which I sit. Who am I that the children of men should have shaped and carved for me four extra wooden legs besides the two that were given me by the gods? For it is the point of all deprivation that it sharpens the idea of value; and, perhaps, this is, after all, the reason of the riddle of death.

A perfect meditation for these times.

Or, in the words of Joni Mitchell, don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone?

 

Happy Easter!

Christ is risen!
He is risen, indeed!

We have now concluded a very intense season of Lent, so much of which has been beyond our control. Because of COVID-19, we will be celebrating Easter in our homes and not our churches; many people continue to suffer from this virus, many have died, and more are expected to succumb; social and economic hardships continue.

However, we know that the troubles of this life will never have the final say, because Christ is risen from the grave. In the words of Pope St. John Paul II (Angelus, Adelaide, Australia, November 30, 1986):

We do not pretend that life is all beauty. We are aware of darkness and sin, of poverty and pain. But we know Jesus has conquered sin and passed through his own pain to the glory of the Resurrection. And we live in the light of his Paschal Mystery – the mystery of his Death and Resurrection. “We are an Easter People and Alleluia is our song!”.

Wherever you are, may you experience joy and hope in the Risen Christ!

G.K. Chesterton on Sheltering in Place

Staying home with little to do but housework (and that, best avoided!) does have its advantages. For a while I have had sitting on my bookshelf In Defense of Sanity: The Best Essays of G.K. Chesterton (D. Ahlquist ed., Ignatius Press 2011). Chesterton is not a quick read for me. His writing is dense and clever, and if I’m not paying careful attention, his wittiness and meaning will wash right over me without penetrating. So, now is the time to spend some time with GKC.

I didn’t have to get far in the book this afternoon before Chesterton proved his timelessness. His observations from the 1905 essay “On Certain Modern Writers and the Institution of the Family,” could have been written this week about those of us stuck at home in our maybe-not-entirely-harmonious households:

The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one.

[. . .]

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. . . . The reason is obvious. In a large community we can choose our companions. In a small community our companions are chosen for us.

[. . .]

If we were to-morrow morning snowed up in the street in which we live, we should step suddenly into a much larger and much wilder world than we have ever known. And it is the whole effort of the typically modern person to escape from the street in which he lives. . . . He says he is fleeing his street because it is dull; he is lying. He is really fleeing from his street because it is a great deal too exciting. It is exciting because it is exacting; it is exacting because it is alive.

It is “exacting” to live together in close quarters, around the clock, without coming to blows. Chesterton is riffing on what is now the old adage, “You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family.” More:

It is a good thing for a man to live in a family for the same reason that it is a good thing for a man to be besieged in a city. It is a good thing for a man to live in a family in the same sense that it is a beautiful and delightful thing for a man to be snowed up in a street. They all force him to realize that life is not a thing from outside, but a thing from inside.

We are “beseiged in our cities” by a germ, if not by an army. Maybe this experience will help us grow in compassion and patience. May we all realize more than before that life is a “thing from inside.”

Remember, O man, you are dust….

Saint Jerome, 1537. Found in the Collection of Art History Museum, Vienne. (Photo by Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)

The skull in this portrait of St. Jerome is an example of a “memento mori,” a reminder of death. The memento mori was once a fairly common trope in art, as this article from The Art of Manliness website explains quite nicely, illustrated with a variety of examples. https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/memento-mori-art/

As I write this, the entire world is in the grip of the COVID-19 [novel coronavirus] pandemic; 526,044 cases have been reported, and 23,709 people have died around the globe. Even if we do not wish to think of death, circumstances compel us.

We who claim the name of “Christian” must face trying times, and the prospect of death, with hope. This second of the “theological virtues” is that “virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, ¶1817. That this pandemic is raging on during Lent does not seem like a coincidence.

Despite the cultural shroud of silence that surrounds the issue of death, we all want to know how to approach our own end with grace and dignity. In his review of Nicholas Diat’s A Time to Die: Monks on the Threshold of Eternal Life (Ignatius Press, 2019), Matthew C. Nickel, Ph.D. writes that the “monks serve as models, and we would do well to turn off the news and listen attentively to their stories.” https://www.catholicworldreport.com/2020/03/25/a-time-to-read-nicolas-diats-a-time-to-die/

This volume will definitely go on my reading list.

h/t Joyce G.