eucharist

First Things First

Homily for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the first Reading, we find ourselves back in the desert. Moses calls attention to the experience of the Israelites: “Remember how for forty years now the Lord, your God, has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction…” (Deut 8, 2). It was the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob who led them out into and through the desert: a pillar of fire by night, a pillar of cloud by day. And they had to experience the hunger and thirst of living in the desert wilderness because they had to learn to depend on God. And this is a hard lesson to learn. But the Lord leads all of us, at certain points in our lives, out into the desert wilderness in order that we may learn to depend on Him, to allow him to lead.

Many of us, however, have a very real fear that “if I give my finger to God, he’s going to take my whole hand”. And so, we hold back, unwilling to surrender our entire selves. For many of us it takes a lifetime to learn to give God not just our hand, but our entire body. In the meantime, He does allow us to see what happens when we have Him take a back seat while we take the lead. Imagine if the Israelites were to lead themselves out of Egypt and through the desert. Would they have made it to the land of promise, the land of Canaan? No, they would not have. God has to lead because of three important factors: 1) He is all powerful, which means he can do whatever he wants. Nothing limits God; 2) He’s all knowing, so He knows what is best for us and what conditions need to be in place for us to achieve that end; and 3) He wills the best for us, which is what it means to say that God is Love. He wills our greatest good and happiness, and He knows better than we do what constitutes our greatest happiness and precisely how to bring it about, and He has the power to bring it about, but not without our cooperation. He won’t force himself upon us; for love is not love unless it is freely given, and friendship is a two-way street. He offers us His friendship and waits for our response. And God is patient; He will wait our entire lives if He has to.

So, we have to allow Him to lead, but we are creatures of habit, and we are afraid. That is why He allows us to taste the lifelessness and desolation of the wilderness, which is life as it eventually becomes when we choose to take charge. But we cannot lead, because we are not all knowing, and we are profoundly limited and vulnerable, for all of us are just one freak accident from paralysis and becoming completely dependent upon the care of others or from ending up on the street. But for some strange reason, that isn’t obvious to most people. They seem to believe that such things couldn’t happen to them.

The manna with which God fed Israel in the desert is of course a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. The message is simple: If we don’t eat, we die. I remember watching the 2004 film Supersize Me. The director of this film decides to subsist on food from the McDonald’s menu for an entire month. Soon his energy level drops and he begins to experience horrible side effects. I don’t mean to put down McDonald’s–I think they have the best coffee and fast food is very convenient at times. But notice what happens when he goes from a healthy diet to a steady diet of food that is meant only to have occasionally.

For me, the parallel is obvious. We cannot feed sporadically on the Bread of Life. The Eucharist has to be our staple. It is the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ, in the act of sacrificing himself to God the Father. We are fed on Christ himself. He is our food. If we neglect that food and instead choose to feed on other things in this world that are good, just not Christ, like entertainment, travel, trips to exotic places, fine cuisine, etc., gradually our spiritual energy level plummets. These things cannot sustain us. We were created for the Bread of Life, Christ himself. Without a steady diet of the Eucharist, we slowly die.

The spiritual life must be first; God must be first; Christ must be first; the Bread of Life must be first. God will take care of the rest. He said it himself: “Don’t worry about what you are to eat and what you are to drink and what you are to wear; seek first the kingdom of God and all these other things will be provided” (Mt 6, 33).

God will lead us through turbulent waters and through the heat of the desert, towards the land of promise. But we must make an act of the will, a commitment to stay the course despite how we feel on certain days, an act of the will to allow him to lead in our married lives, and in our work, so that our work becomes his work, no matter what that is, whether that’s cleaning toilets, scrubbing floors or high finance. It all has dignity because it is work and work is holy.

When we consume the Eucharist, we become what we eat. We become Christ. What this means is that when we leave the parish Church and enter back into our homes and into the world of work, we bring Christ into the home and into the world. A home with Christ in it is a peaceful home, and it is through us that Christ is in the world. And if it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me (Gal 2, 20), then the way others relate to me and you is the way they relate to Christ, and that becomes their salvation, no matter what religion they are (Muslim, Hindu, Sikh, Buddhist, or no religion at all). In relating to you, who have become Christ in consuming his body and blood, they relate to Christ without necessarily being aware of it. And if they love you, they love Christ without even knowing it.

 

 

Miscellaneous Thoughts on Receiving Communion

Deacon Douglas McManaman

In the last little while, visiting a number of parishes, I have noticed that some parishioners–not many to be sure–will deliberately cross over onto another communion line in order to receive communion from the priest, as opposed to the extraordinary minister, a layman or laywoman. I inquired about this from one such person, and the reasoning, I found, had almost no coherence whatsoever. It seems to me that the very idea that one ought to receive communion from a priest and not a lay person is nothing more than liturgical snobbery. The entire Church received “holy communion” from a lay woman, namely Mary, Jesus’ own mother. That should settle the matter. But of course it doesn’t. 

Consider the optics if we were to employ Kant’s principle of universalizability to this issue. A parish priest requests help to distribute holy communion from some of the faithful, who then become extraordinary ministers of communion. The rest of the congregation, however, adopts the attitude that communion should only be received from a priest, not a laywoman or layman. The extraordinary ministers would be standing there the whole time, waiting and watching everyone line up and receive from the priest. It is safe to say that this would certainly frustrate the pastor who would like to finish the Mass at a reasonable time. 

But more to the point, is communion somehow different when it is received from the hands of a laywoman or layman? Is it less than Christ? Or, does a person receive something more, for example, a greater dignity perhaps, when he or she receives communion from a priest? If so, how does that work precisely? 

Perhaps it is about reverence, as the person I questioned insisted it is. And so, is it the case that if I wish to show greater reverence to Christ, I should receive communion from the hand of a priest as opposed to the hand of a laywoman or layman? Again, if so, how does that work? To show reverence to Christ pleases him; to show greater reverence to Christ pleases him more. And so I approach the communion minister, I bow or make some reverential gesture, receive the host and then move on, but if I were to receive from the hand of an ordained priest, somehow Christ is more pleased with me, because I’ve shown him greater reverence? I have not yet been able to figure this out, even with the help of one who insists on receiving communion only from a priest.

Moreover, “communion” means just that: “union”, not only with Christ, but with the entire worshipping community. Of course, there is diversity within that community and that should not be suppressed (diverse talents, experiences, angles on life, spiritualities, etc.), but liturgically some people insist on doing their own thing, and the result is that some are kneeling, most are standing, some receive on the tongue, and some–thankfully most–receive on the hand, some only from the priest, and some–thankfully most–from either a priest or layman/woman, whoever is available at the moment. Is it the case that some people have a need to separate themselves from the “commoners”? Whatever way we slice it, I can’t help but suspect that this is another instance of Phariseeism (from Aramaic perishayya, “separated ones”).

Christ ate with sinners and tax collectors, shared meals with them, thereby entering into a profound communion with them–given the Jewish understanding of what it means to share a meal–, thereby becoming ritually unclean in the eyes of the religious leaders, which is why they despised him. Jesus was not concerned about ritual purity, as we see from the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he despised the elitist and condescending arrogance of the Pharisees, referring to them as whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead and every kind of filth. His attitude appears to me to be the complete opposite of the semi-elitist attitude that insists on receiving communion from an ordained priest only, as though it were “below me” to receive from an ordinary layperson, as it was below the religious leaders to share a meal with those ignorant of the Torah. 

But I’ve been assured that this is not the sentiment. But then I am asked: Are not the priests’ hands anointed at his  Ordination? They are, but so are the hands of those who receive the anointing of the sick, and so too the heads of babies who are baptized. Confirmandi are anointed on the forehead at Confirmation. Anointing represents Christ (Gk: Christos, anointed one), and oil symbolizes strength, wealth and royalty. All of us have been anointed (in Baptism and Confirmation), and all of us share in the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. The congregation is a congregation of priests, because Israel and the New Israel (the Church) is a “priestly people” (Exodus 19, 6). The laos (people) have been “set apart”. As our first Pope said:  “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (2 Peter 2, 9). That a baby’s head has been anointed with sacred chrism, endowing that child with a new identity, namely that of priest, prophet and king, does not in any way necessitate different behaviour on the part of others towards the baby. Some will zero in on that aspect of the ordination ceremony in which a priest’s hands are anointed and deduce that this somehow suggests that we should behave differently towards him–i.e., choose his communion line–and that doing so is “more reverent towards our Lord”. Somehow his hands add something to the significance of my receiving communion, but what exactly that is, I have no idea at this point.

I cannot help but think that this is another symptom of the disease of clericalism that Francis so often spoke out against. He explicitly warned the laity not to put priests on pedestals, and yet how this decision to receive only from the hand of a priest is not an instance of just such a practice is beyond me.  

Perhaps this practice of receiving communion only from an ordained priest is a subtle but real repudiation of the layperson’s sharing in the royal priesthood of the faithful. After all, the procession begins when the faithful leave their homes to go to the Church to celebrate Mass. The formal procession at the start of the Mass is merely a continuation of the procession that the people began when leaving their houses. The offertory is precisely the offering of this priestly people, an offering of their sufferings, their labor, their treasure, etc., and it takes the form of bread and wine (the parish purchases the bread and wine out of the treasury that comes from the people). The ministerial priest offers the bread and wine on behalf of this priestly people, the congregation. Christ receives that offering and changes it into himself, returning it to us, saying: “take and eat”. The priest is merely an instrument, an unworthy instrument as Pope Benedict XVI would often remind us. It is Christ who consecrates, it is Christ who is the single priest and victim. The ministerial priest is acting in persona Christi, which means that it is really Christ who is the agent who changes the offering (bread and wine) into himself–just as it is Christ, not the priest or deacon, who gives life in baptism and infuses the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity into the soul of the baptized, among other things. 

The function of a ministerial priest is different from the function of those who belong to the common priesthood of the faithful, but it is a function that is entirely at the service of the priestly people that is the congregation. One can certainly say that the priest is “set apart” for a specific work, and that is true, but he is set apart to serve the entire people who have been set apart from the world, who have become a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. The significance of his vocation cannot be understood apart from this community. In other words, his priestly function cannot be understood except within the larger context of the priestly nature of the community. I’m reminded of Pius X, when people were kissing his papal ring, his mother said to him: “Keep in mind that you wouldn’t be wearing that ring if it were not for this ring here” (pointing to her wedding ring). The ministerial priest is “set apart” to act on behalf of the priestly congregation, which is “a people set apart”. 

Peter himself gives us a clue to the resolution of this issue: “As Peter was about to enter, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet to worship him. But Peter helped him up. “Stand up,” he said, “I am only a man myself” (Acts 10, 26).

Some people look upon the clergy not as lowly common servants (feet washers), but as members of the British Royal Family, as it were, and within such a mindset, one will only hear the gospel within the framework of an old monarchical ecclesiology, which keeps a person from understanding the gospel’s radical nature.  

I’ve tried to understand this issue from various angles, but the reasoning continues to make as much sense to me as a person who believes, deep within his heart, that eating potato chips is an offence to koala bears, so instead he chooses to eat corn chips.