The Gifts of the Eucharist
By Helen Alvaré
Two basic intuitions inform my reflections on how we can come to a deeper understanding of the Eucharist during this period of Eucharistic revival. First, that the overarching roadblock to our better grasping the significance of the Eucharist begins with the basic but also huge difficulty of perceiving reality itself. To wit, we struggle to perceive that the invisible, the transcendent, is huge and in fact bigger than the visible. And second, that many of us struggle to embrace the particular attributes of the Eucharist itself.
Beginning with the first, matter human beings suffer limited perception, which often blinds us to the truth that our world is suffused with the divine and is not simply made by us. Our day-to-day life is like this, albeit not for nefarious reasons, but for practical ones, like work obligations, daily household chores, the needs of everyone in our families and often our friends too.
How are we to perceive the invisible when the visible is jumping up and down screaming, “Me! Me! Me! Look at me!” How, in the words of the mid-20th-century spiritual writer Evelyn Underhill, will we take seriously that we
are essentially spiritual as well as natural creatures, and that therefore life in its fullness… must involve correspondence not only with our visible and ever-changing, but also with our invisible and unchanging, environment? [Instead of] mostly spend[ing our] lives conjugating the three verbs: to Want, to Have and to Do.
How can we, in the words of Father Walter Ciszek, who emerged from Soviet captivity to write the magnificent spiritual classic He Leadeth Me, perceive all day, every day that
God’s will [is] not hidden somewhere “out there” in the situations in which I found myself; the situations themselves were his will for me. What he wanted was for me to accept these situations as from his hands, to let go of the reins and place myself entirely at his disposal.
I think our difficulty agreeing to live within this reality is the overarching obstacle to our more fully receiving the mystery that is the Eucharist—that it is God with us, thus eternity in time.
How to begin to scale this hill? We are encouraged by the humble cook, Brother Lawrence, to “practice the presence of God” by constantly bringing Him to mind in the everyday circumstances of our lives; by Theresa of Avila to “recollect our senses;” by Ignatius of Loyola to use our imagination such that experiences like those of the Apostles and disciples recounted in the Gospels can become more our experience of God; to take time each day in silence to let God speak to us about where He is and has been present in our daily experiences; to use our will before our intellect and say to God: “I don’t fully understand this eternity-in-time that is all around me, but I promise to live as if it is true, and to pray for vision and for understanding to come.”
In sum, I believe that greater understanding of the Eucharist begins with far greater and daily recollection of the presence of the divine-with-us.
As to the second point, what are the characteristics of the particular invisible, eternal, spiritual reality of the Eucharist? How do we struggle to grasp these and how might we overcome our struggles?
Characteristics of the Eucharist
A first characteristic of the Eucharist: it’s enacting that how to love to “save” another is sacrifice. This flows from what it commemorates—the ghastly, excruciatingly painful, bloody, voluntary death of our Lord for the likes of us. All my rational life I have known this, yet it shocks me that I’m in my 60s and just beginning to grasp this aspect: Jesus’ teaching that love requires sacrifice. That the bread/His Body is broken for us.
I hadn’t realized how often in life I had been avoiding sacrifice, hedging against it, trying to mitigate it, to buy or study or reason my way out of it. I hadn’t realized until I lost my husband suddenly and shockingly last year, and suffered various crises concerning the children. Then I understood in a new way that suffering, and grief, and loss are “built in” to love—are its flip side. I began to identify mostly with the suffering Jesus, He who puts up with endless and infinitely worse grief from us. I began to see that I had to live the relationship between suffering and love in my interactions with everyone. Whether by co-suffering or being willing to sacrifice more on behalf of another.
I think almost nobody feels herself ready to easily live like this, but in fact, this characteristic of the Eucharist is the pattern of Jesus’ life, and thus also must be the pattern of ours.
A second and related characteristic of the Eucharist with which we struggle is its feeding us the actual Body and Blood of Christ. Apparently, early Christians even acquired a reputation among some as cannibals because of this. But Jesus doubles down when challenged as to whether this is actually His Body and Blood (remember John 6:52-55).
To what can we compare this reality of the Eucharist? Understanding that all analogies ultimately fall short because this is God’s Body we’re talking about, we need help to grasp this fact. Can we compare it to breast feeding? To organ donation? To offering one’s life in prison, like Maximillian Kolbe in exchange for another designated victim? To heroic, dangerous military sacrifice? To parental sacrifice: mental, physical, emotional, financial? To the lifelong sacrifice following a clerical or religious vow? To constant caregiving work for the sick or elderly? To anyone who pours herself out with another’s good foremost in mind? I think yes to all of the above, albeit raised to the infinite power because this is Jesus pouring out His Body for us.
And with these analogies, maybe we can come to some bit of wisdom. Understanding that the Eucharist instructs that we are essentially in need of help, of being fed, like children. In need of gifts from the very marrow, the very substance of another. In need of gifts emerging out of another’s pain as the daily stuff of life, not only on extraordinary occasions!
A third characteristic of the Eucharist we have difficulty grasping is its employing the most ordinary and basic realities of bread and wine as the foundation for the stuff of the extraordinary.
But remember the fabulous words about the Christian difference in loving another from the mouth of the saintly Fr. Zosima in Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:
love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labor and fortitude.
And I think that there are analogies in the created world, maybe, that we can use to grasp the truth of how this “works.” Especially as we get older, we find that things that the world did not credit as large or important gestures matter enormously. I think often of my father who poured himself out for my disabled sister without reserve until she died at age 50. When he died, a few years later, no one spoke of the corporate vice presidencies he assumed, or the more famous ones he rejected in order to have a better schedule for our family. We simply remembered him as the prince he was to that sister in need, in her day-in, day-out sorrows and defeats. I think of my late-husband rising at 3 am to drive a child to the airport, or driving 9 hours round trip just to visit my daughter during her layover between an international and domestic flight and to bring her coffee and breakfast.
In short, the coming of Christ in the humble bread and wine is God’s way, and is likewise supposed to be our way too.
This leads us to another characteristic of the Eucharist we find difficult to grasp: how it demands our faith without all the proof that human beings usually want in these matters. It demands that we believe it to be God Himself, no matter how it appears to the naked eye.
We can observe that this is characteristic not only of the Eucharist but also of the whole Christian way—we are asked to believe more than we can directly observe. We know that Jesus saves a special blessing for such faith when He says to Thomas, “blessed are those who have not seen and have believed” (John 20:29).
But we also know how very hard this is in a world where falsehoods are so prevalent, and where empirical, technological advancements are so common and so vaunted, such that people are accustomed to demanding concrete proof before granting belief. Yet Christianity insists that we have to bend our will to God, even when our intellect still lacks understanding.
What experience do we have to try to grasp this dynamic? Relationships of love. For example, in the understanding a child gains of her parents’ love after years of care and loving gestures, without the need for any verified empirical measurements and reports! In the trust that long-married spouses have that one’s husband or wife will always act for their good.
Another characteristic of the Eucharist we struggle to appropriate is its persistent reminding us of the depth of our depravity, the size of the pool of sin from which Christ rescued us.
We remember Jesus’ sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane, and His gut-wrenching cry on the Cross, “my God my God why have you forsaken me,” when the full weight of our sin was threatening to crush Him. This is of course the very essence of what we do to ourselves when we sin: separate ourselves from God. Yet the Son of God, God himself, allowed Himself to experience this on our behalf. And in this way, the Eucharist reminds us, day in and day out, of our ongoing sinfulness and need for redemption. It literally puts the fear of God into us.
On the flip side, there is the characteristic way the Eucharist manifests the “too good to be true” quality of God. He is not just marginally or even a lot more good than we are, but mind-blowingly everything our deepest desires want in love. It’s this desire Paul describes: “Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Romans 5:7–8).
It is the desire for total redemption that Jesus is responding to when He, the sinless one, God Himself, chooses to die in a ghastly manner for the likes of us! It is our desire God is responding to when He promises us the size of the love we crave, but dare not ask for, when He says that He will be “with us to the end of time” and that He “will not leave us orphans.” In essence, God has no prior engagements and wants to dwell in love, with us, at all times. And when He says with us, He means in the closest possible way: by being in us, as food is in us.
We can better plumb what this means by considering the experience of people who are Christ to us, with gestures beyond what we deserve or expect. I think, for example, of a priest friend of mine who, since my husband passed, comes by my house with all his tools, in order to fix whatever has recently broken. The Eucharist is that kind of company.
A final characteristic of the Eucharist we might struggle to accept is its recalling and enacting that our salvation takes place in community. This is God’s way in salvation history, and His way with this sacrament that is the “source and summit” of our Christian life. From His coming to “his people” Israel, to Jesus’ public ministry, to the Last Supper in the company of His Apostles, to His appearances in their company following His Resurrection. And the early Christians continued in this communal way, being identifiable to the Jewish public by their group presence at Solomon’s Portico (see Acts 5), and at Pentecost too, to name just a few events.
And of course, from very early times, Christians gathered to share the Body and Blood of Christ, which became known as “Communion.” They expressed a person’s membership in this group, and their suitability to share in the Christian life of another village when they traveled, by providing “Communion letters” to the traveler. This letter not only allowed the person to participate in the local Eucharistic meal, but also meant that he or she had a claim to Christian hospitality, to being housed and cared for at the expense of the Christian hosts.
Of course, as Catholics, we are concerned to ensure a personal love relationship with God, but this is never the end of the story. Because God has seen fit to save us as a community, we assume responsibility for the well-being of others in our Catholic community and, even beyond this community, given Jesus’ words about our obligations to all those strewn on our path, Good Samaritan style. In short, the Eucharist says we are one body, made one by participation in the one Body of Christ, and that we must live what we are.
Gifts of the Eucharist
My last point concerns the gifts of the Eucharist, and our laboring to perceive, understand, and let ourselves participate in them. We desire things far less extraordinary than God has in mind, so we have to be quite mindful of being open to His gifts.
The first gift of the Eucharist is that it’s a tangible reminder of the love of God. This is so hard for many people to accept! For all the reasons described above, but also maybe from a fear of how we would have to live if we really imbibed this. Would we find ourselves doing something as extravagant and over the top as Mary Magdalene when, confronted with Christ’s love for her, she washed His feet with her tears, and dried it with her hair in front of a group of gawking spectators.
We are the people who believe God really came to earth and lived among us. We believe in miracles that from time to time supervene in our world, in conversions that change heart and mind. The Eucharist requires us to grant also that God can decide and has decided to become specially present every single time the Eucharist is consecrated.
A second gift of the Eucharist is what theologian Luigi Giussani calls “impossible unity.” That is, impossible for us alone but not for God. Again, we struggle to grasp this in a world of temporary things and even relationships, a world of division, anger, and competition.
But the Eucharist promises us a unity beyond the power of death, sin, geography, relational rupture, or any changed circumstances to destroy. It says we are one because nothing is more important than our having been created by, saved by, and called to live eternally with God. This means we see everyone on our path with the eyes of God, as “like us,” being made in his image and likeness. We both acknowledge this as a fact, and simultaneously pray for the will to live it, because of the Eucharistic gift of unity.
Another gift of the Eucharist we struggle to appropriate is strength for the journey. We are accustomed to planning according to our own strength, by way of health, nutrition, education, training, logistics, money, etc. How could this tiny thing—Communion—give us strength? Because He who feeds us is (to use many biblical formulations) the “rock,” “God with us/Emmanuel,” “I Am.” He is the one who chose this visible sign—the stuff of life we cannot get through any day without, bread—to effectuate his presence. So no matter what unfolds in our lives, as the great spiritual writer Walter Ciszek learned during his time in Soviet labor camps, “When tomorrow comes, we will have to live in it…. But God will be there.”
What we need now is to internalize that accepting the Eucharist is to invite a shift in our whole world view, against all kinds of tendencies in the world pushing us toward living within the limits of our own weak minds and weak wills. We are invited to accept eternity in time, that “impossible unity” is possible in Christ, and that God is offering us gifts that even our own desires aren’t bold enough to wish for.
Helen M. Alvaré is the Robert A. Levy Professor of Law at the Antonin Scalia Law School at George Mason University who has worked for the Church for 37 years in various capacities. Her most recent books include Religious Freedom After the Sexual Revolution: A Catholic Guide and Christianity and the Laws of Conscience: An Introduction. This essay is adapted from a talk given at last year’s Eucharistic Congress in Madison, Wisconsin.
A beautiful reflection, Helen. I am so sorry for your loss!