The
Eucharist is never an event involving just two, a dialogue between Christ and
me. Eucharistic communion is aimed at a complete reshaping of my own life. It
breaks up man’s entire self and creates a new ‘we’. Communion with Christ is
necessarily also communication with all who belong to him: therein I myself become part of the new bread
that he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly reality.
Joseph
Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, 78
Reflection – Then Cardinal Ratzinger packs quite a
lot of weighty content into a very few words here. Something of a gift he
had—his writings have the quality of being both seemingly simple and
accessible, yet with depths of meaning that require careful reading and
thought.
Here, it is
about the relationship of the reception of the Eucharist and belonging to the
Church. This is the primary theme of this entire book, which is superb. In our
hyper-individualistic, subjectivist, and consumerist world, we tend to think of
the Eucharist as something we just go to ourselves, so that we can each get
this thing from Jesus that we need or want to get.
It’s rather
like lining up in a buffet line to get the food we crave, and indeed in an
extremely subjectivist view of the Eucharist, it is rather like a buffet, isn’t
it? I am going up there for healing; another is going up for consolation; a
third is going for strength; a fourth, for fellowship. Maybe someone in the
line is going up for the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ
which is the life of the soul, but another is going up for something quite
different.
Well, that’s
all well and good in the all-you-can-commune buffet line of the soul. The
Eucharist means something very different to each one of us, and as long as we
are true to the meaning it has for us, it doesn’t really matter. This would
only be true, of course, if the Eucharist has no meaning in and of itself, but
is a sort of blank screen on which we can project whatever our personal
spiritual ‘truth’ is at this time.
This of course
has nothing whatsoever to do with the Catholic or Orthodox doctrine of the
Eucharist, nor for that matter with any of the Eucharistic theologies that came
out of the Protestant Reformation. It is entirely novel, a product of the
post-modern, atomized, consumerist culture of our day. For that matter it is
such a vapid and ultimately meaningless view of the Eucharist that the only way
it can be seen as persuasive is under the influence of a sort of Hegelian
historicism, whereby any new idea is a
priori superior to any old idea, however silly and unfounded it may be.
Ratzinger
offers here, in very few words, the much deeper traditional doctrine of the
Eucharist. In entering into this depth of encounter with Jesus, with the real,
living resurrected and ascended Christ, we do not simply remain at the level of
the individual and ‘my’ need for Jesus.
Rather, Jesus
breaks us open to the much bigger, broader, deeper level of engagement with the
whole body of believers, with the whole world, radically redefines what it
means to be a ‘self’, actually, a person, into a Christological and Trinitarian
mode. Not so much a buffet line, but being buffeted into an entirely new mode of being a person.
We, in our fallen and broken condition, define personhood of selfhood as
something fundamentally opposed or at least in sharp distinction from other
selves, other persons. We may get along with others or be in conflict with
others, but at any rate we do see that the fundamental identification of
ourselves as ‘self’ is that I am not you, you are not me, and each of us is
precisely, only, and ultimately the self we are.
The Eucharist
blasts all that out of the water. Because the Eucharist configures our whole
self around the indwelling presence of Christ, and Christ is God, and God is
Trinity, and the persons of the Trinity are defined by their relations to one
another, when we receive the Eucharist our whole self becomes defined by
relation, relation to God and then in that mutual relation to God, relation to
one another, to the body of believers, to all those who are incorporated into
Christ.
And this is
precisely what we mean in our Catholic tradition by the word ‘Church’. The
Eucharist makes the Church, and it is the direct immediate effect of the
reception of the Eucharist that it makes us fully and totally engaged in this
membership, in the incorporation, the becoming fully and totally ‘of the Body’
of the Church.
Nor is it some
vague spiritual abstraction—again, that is a wholly novel idea of the Church, unheard of until our modern disincarnated age.
The Church is a visible entity on the earth, even if its precise borders cannot
be wholly known this side of the parousia.
The negative
aspect of this is that this is why we insist that communion can only be taken
by those who are fully members of the Body, who are fully incorporated into the
visible Church. But the positive aspect of this is far more important than the
negative ‘rule’ we have to insist on. Eucharist breaks me open and plunges me
into a depth of union with my brothers and sisters that demands the whole of
me, mind, heart, spirit. And in that union, “I myself become part of the new
bread that he is creating by the resubstantiation of the whole of earthly
reality.”
This is an outstanding article, Fr. Denis. It definitely challenged me - very inspiring. I think everyone should read it!
ReplyDeleteThanks, Tanya. I enjoyed writing it!
DeleteThe Church is the Gateway to Christ. ALL are called to enter and partake. It is not the priest's job to decide who may enter or partake. It is not their job to instruct or define for people the relationship that they have with God or evaluate their qualification or fitness to do so..
ReplyDeleteWhere did you get the idea that you are some sort of discriminating gatekeeper? Christ is the good shepherd. You are just another sheep. Move along. Do not impede others who are really seeking.