Feast of Corpus Christi, 1997

We can come to nourish each other

While thinking about the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body of Christ, I recalled something that has happened a number of times over the past few years. Several people I’ve known, have in the course of conversation, made this statement, all independently of each other: "If it weren’t for the Eucharist, I’d leave the Church." Well, that sounds like some kind of niggardly, minimalist adherence to this group, but unfortunately the character of all those people that have made that statement is any thing but niggardly, and their adherence to the figure of Jesus and the Gospel is anything but minimalist. On the other hand it is no secret that there are many conflicts and a great dissatisfaction with many things in the Church today so that a lot of people feel very much on the edge. The point of this is to give us an opportunity to think about what it is in the Eucharist that would be the point of adherence to the Church. Then interesting things happen...

If you look at the document of the Second Vatican Council, it says that it is precisely the Eucharist that is the centre and source of the whole Christian operation. So people who have said this sort of thing, who seem to be just hanging on by their, are precisely right; they are at the heart of the matter. We have to ask: "what is there about the Eucharist?" If you stand apart from the empirical realisation of the Eucharist, as this group, worshipping here, or any Catholic group celebrating Mass, what is going on? I think that the Eucharist is contact with the absolute generosity of God. This is what is going on. Presumably, nobody forced anybody to be here in this room today. And though there may be some residual guilt-driven attendance here, I think most of us are ready to slough all that off. What does lie at the heart of the thing, is that here, in this gesture, however meagerly manifested or deficient in form and elegance, is perceptible: here we are being fed by God, for no reason or virtue of our own. That is precisely what it is all about. I did not ask to be fed here, but I know I will be fed here. The gesture of breaking bread, and eating and drinking, no matter how remote it may seem, does still work. God is after us. The "Hound of Heaven," for those of you who remember that Thompson poem, is pursuing us with this unspeakable and totally unwarranted benevolence, and we are seeing it manifested in the life of this man who would say "this is me for you, with no hidden agenda or hooks."

What occurs if we open our hearts and are attentive to what we are doing is simply to be bathed in this astonishing act of generosity and realise that God is here for us. The danger of this response, and of course there is always a danger, is that, whenever someone becomes aware that they are loved they can misuse that love. That is it can become another means of self-promotion, another form of self-indulgence. "I am God’s favourite," you see this over and over in the Hebrew Bible and you see it in the history of the Church and you see it, unfortunately, in many of the prayers of the Liturgy where we continue to pray for just "us saved ones." But, at bottom the Eucharist is to expand our hearts, so that all those people in the world who are not fed, either literally, - and there are many of them, nearly two thirds of the planet, or metaphorically, - now come into view. The Eucharist is truly, as one theologian has it, "Bread broken for the world." The Eucharist works when, as Augustine said 1600 years ago, we have this astonishing thing where the food we eat is not transformed into us, but rather we are transformed into that food. That is, we become the images of Jesus. We become the copies of this man whose heart did embrace everybody, and, above all, those people who do not feel that they are fed or maybe not even feedable.

So, I understand why the adherence to the Eucharist, to Holy Communion, is the last redoubt for many people. But it is not the last redoubt. It is precisely the place from which we are all supposed to stand, and begin, and move. That’s what the Feast of Corpus Christi is. It is not just parades, and Benedictions at every third corner, and flower patterns on the pavement. It is far more astonishing and much more worthy to celebrate the fact that God does want to nourish us, and that God does nourish us, so that we can come to nourish each other.

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RT 22/5/97