There are many elements at play in these responses of the Eucharist. For example, one might ask, "What does the real presence of Christ entail?". Most of us were taught to accept a crudely physicalist understanding of the Eucharist and the belief that if we bit into the host, blood would pour into our mouths. However, are the aforementioned statistics simply based on a rejection of this kind of primitivism, or, is something larger and more serious amiss? I am inclined to believe that the latter is most likely the case and in order to look into this problematic we must ask ourselves, what is occurring in the Eucharist?

I would like to suggest a seemingly indirect manner of getting at the Eucharist. We can begin to attempt this by going back from the passage that Sheila read from 1 Corinthians ("We have received this tradition...that on the night before Jesus died, he said...") and what occurred afterwards, that is, the very situation that moved Paul to begin to talk about the Eucharist. Parenthetically note that this text was written at an extraordinarily early point the history of the Christian movement, -Paul talked about the tradition of the Eucharist around the year sixty. Thus, the celebration of The Last Supper, the Eucharist, appears to have been a central element in the Christian belief from its inception. But what upset Paul was this. The early Christians assembled in peoples' houses and there, the ritual celebration of the Lord's Supper was always preceded by a normal meal. Paul was extraordinarily exercised because the wealthy people who came and brought all kinds of food and ate it by themselves, while the poor waited for the wealthy peoples' meal to end so that they could celebrate the Lord's Supper. Paul's reaction to this was outrage: he wrote in response,"You do not recognize the body of the Lord!" This remark is what I am interested in because it is most telling. What was Paul referring to? Was he angry over the wealthy missing the meaning of the Eucharist, or (and I would like to suggest that both of these possibilities were probably in play), was Paul disturbed because these wealthy individuals did not recognize the body of the Lord in the poor, that is, the people who were there with them? This dynamic is very interesting in that because these wealthy people did not recognize the body of the Lord in their fellow believers, they could not recognize the body of the Lord in the celebration of the Lord's Supper. This is a startling view of things.

I would like to take Paul's Eucharist interpretation one step further, certain forms of deconstructionism that not only are we unable to identify with our fellow believers, we also do not very readily identify the reality, that is, the humanity of the human beings who surround us, because we have so functionalized each other. And so I went back to a text that I chose for one of my ordination cards, a line from the Russian religious philosopher Nicholas Berdyaev makes this proposal: "Perhaps the mystery of God [mystery is the subject of today's Mass] is better revealed by the mystery of humanity, than by a direct search for God to the exclusion of human beings". Bergyaev makes an interesting proposal in that he talks about human beings as mysteries, that we are more than our official statistics and the occupations that we undertake. But if we are essentially mysterious, and this may in itself involve an act of faith, and, if mystery means "beyond articulation," then where do we go? So then I went back to another text that I had read forty years ago, one that has never left me. It was written by the American writer James Agee. In the 1930s, he was commissioned by Fortune magazine to live with a group of sharecroppers in the South and to write of his experience. Instead of being 40,000 words, his manuscript became a book-length text. It was not published by Fortune, but it was eventually published as "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men". This is Agee's background. And so, Agee is given the task of entering into the lives of these other human beings; and if you know anything about his other writings, what he writes as a result of this experience is not going to surprise you. In the passage that I am about to read, Agee attempts precisely to intimate the mysteriousness, depth, and the surplus of meaning in a human being in the very density of his language. So, I ask that you listen very carefully. I have edited this passage very severely; however, this is what Agee writes:

For one who sets himself to look at all earnestly...
into the living eyes of a human life: what is it he
there beholds that so freezes and abashes his
ambitious heart? What is it, profound behind the
outward windows of each one of you, beneath touch even
of your own suspecting, drawn tightly back at bay
against the backward wall and blackness of its prison
cave, so that the eyes alone shine of their own angry
glory, but the eyes of a trapped wild animal, or of a
furious angel nailed to the ground by his wings, or
however else one may faintly designate the human
`soul,' that which is angry, that which is wild, that
which is untamable, that which is healthful and holy,
that which is competent of all advantaging within hope
of human dream, that which...is of all these the least
destructable, the least corruptible, the most
defenseless, the most easily and multitudinously
wounded, frustrate, prisoned, and nailed into a
cheating of itself...how, looking thus into your eyes
and seeing thus, how each of you is a creature which
never in all time existed before and which shall never
in all time exist again and which is not quite like any
other and which has the grand stature and natural
warmth of every other and whose existence is all
measured upon a still mad and incurable time; how am I
to speak of you...?

I think that this is a stunning passage. And again, I propose that perhaps it is impossible for us to recognize the real presence of this man Jesus in what we do today because we do not recognize the real humanity of the people we are with. It is absolutely good ecclesiology to say that the Church is the one place where peoples' whole humanity gets full play. And yet, how do we distinguish between the normal sociability of London, Ontario and the encounter with the mysteriousness of the other? Of course, it has to do with our own self-understanding because (and I do not know how this works) I do not think that we can understand the mysteriousness of another human being in that human being's full humanity if we do not understand our own humanity.

With respect to my own experience, everytime that I have tried to penetrate the depth and mysteriousness of another human being, I have come to discover more about myself. It seems to me that this is absolutely essential in appropriating the Eucharist. This is not some kind of high-flown, abstract form of identification, rather, it is the most concrete, genuine reality of our human lives, which of course we evade over and over again because it is too frightening. It is much easier to simply stay on the surface of our relationships with each other and with ourselves and not even begin to intimate that there is much more here that we cannot touch; this is the mystery that we do not want to experience. Thus, I really am persuaded that if the Eucharist does not work, it is not because Jesus is failing, it is because we do not work.

And so, I hope that this discussion is a useful source of meditation for you on this feast of Corpus Christi; I have found it to be helpful of late as I have wondered about the mysteriousness of the other. Moreover, this mysteriousness of the other is related to our practice here (as I have said over and over, this congregation approximates what I believe a real community represents, more so than any explicitly religious group that I have ever been involved with). But I believe that, among ourselves, there is always a danger of floating to the surface. There is always the danger of thinking that at the threshold of this Chapel door is not a different space in comparison to what exists on its exterior, that exterior being a space in which we are all just functions or a number of billiard balls banging into each other. I tried to discern how one can relate to the other and I would like to very seriously propose that the best way in carrying this out is silence. For example, silence is the only means that I know that prepares me for the celebration of the Liturgy. Silence is the only thing that is going to give me the interior space to move from secular space to sacred space. Even if we cannot move from "there," the very exercise of silence is evidence of our desire to carry this out. And, we may just be at that preliminary stage of only wanting to be silent enough to be able to say, "These people here - - my doctor, lawyer, or therapist, or teacher, spouse etc. - - now have to emerge into their own full, mysterious plenitude for me here.

Finally, I really believe that to the extent that we can bring the aforementioned identification off, the celebration of this absolutely primal human gesture of sharing bread can be expressive of the real presence of Jesus, an individual who withheld nothing of himself and was absolutely available to everybody else.

If the New York Times is correct then we certainly are in trouble, but it is very important that we look at where the source of the trouble lies.