| The Eucharist and the Christian Life Part II
Fr Raniero Cantalamessa OFM Cap continues his teaching on how the Eucharist relates to our Christian life
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This doctrine has practical consequences for our daily living. If, in the consecration, we are saying to our brothers and sisters, "Take, eat: this is my body. Take, drink: this is my blood", we need to know what body and blood mean. The word "body" in the Bible, does not mean simply our physical body which is the way we tend to think, as we are heirs to the Greek culture. In biblical language, "body" means the whole human being living in a bodily condition, subject to mortality. Jesus, instituting the Eucharist, gave us as a gift his whole life, from the first moment of his incarnation to his last moment, along with everything that had filled that life: his years of work and silence in Nazareth, his ministry, his weariness, his prayer, his struggles, his joys…. And then Jesus said, "This is my blood". The term "blood" as we use it today indicates an organ of the body, and so part of a part of the whole human person. In the Bible it is not so. Blood means an event: death. If life is in the blood (that is how they thought in biblical times), the "shedding" of blood is a telling sign of death. To say that the Eucharist is the mystery of the body and blood of Christ is the same as to say that it is the mystery of the life and death of Christ. The significance of the body and the blood What do we offer then when we offer our body and our blood along with Jesus in the Mass? In the word body we offer our time, health, energy, abilities, affection, perhaps even one little smile - because only a spirit that lives in a body is able to smile, and, and at times a smile is a very, very precious thing. In the word "blood" we offer our humiliations, failures, illnesses, limitations that come with age or ill health: everything, in short that "mortifies" us. Thanks to the Eucharist, there is no longer any such thing as a "useless" life in this world: no one should ever say, "What possible purpose could my life serve? Why am I in the world at all? You are in the world for the greatest possible purpose that could ever be: to be a living sacrifice, a Eucharist, together with Jesus. The day of someone, confined to bed and totally dependent on others, if lived in this spirit, is in God's eyes more "active" and more precious than the day of the most efficient manager in the world, arranging huge transactions, merging multi-national companies, if he does it all without faith and simply for his own benefit. Let us try to imagine what would happen if we could bring this kind of personal participation to our celebration of the Mass: if each of us, silently, or out loud according to the particular ministry given to each of us, could say truly, at the moment of consecration, "Take, eat: this is my body, Take, drink: this is my blood." A wife and mother celebrates her Mass this way and goes home, to start her day filled with a thousand little things. Her life is crumbled away like a biscuit, seemingly making no mark on history at all. But what she does is in no way insignificant: she is eucharist, together with Jesus! A parish priest or a bishop celebrates the Mass that way, and then he gets on with his day: praying, hearing confessions, reading, receiving people, visiting the sick, listening. His day too is eucharist. He can say, in the words of a French spiritual master: "in the morning, I am the priest and Christ is the victim; during the day Christ is the priest and I am the victim" (P. Olivaint). A nun too says in her heart, at the moment of consecration, "Take eat.." and gets on with her day: children to teach, the sick to nurse, old people to care for. The Mass invades her day, and it becomes one long continuation of Eucharist. I want, however, to consider two special groups of people: workers and young people. The Eucharistic bread, "fruit of the earth and work of human hands", has something very important to say about work, and not only about work on the farm. In the process that leads from the grain of wheat to the loaf on the table, and from the grape to the wine in the glass, all industry is involved: the running of all kinds of machinery, all of commerce, transport, in fact, all the work that human beings do. The Eucharist gathers everything together, sums it all up and unites it all. It reconciles matter with spirit, nature with grace, sacred with profane. It links the entire world to Christ, including that part of it that does not yet know him. When Christ, through the words spoken by the priest at Mass, says, "This is my body", he is referring, says Teilhard de Chardin, not only to the bread and wine, but also (of course, in a different sense) to the "totality of the world." Well before de Chardin's time, St Irenaeus said that the Eucharist, which is celebrated with bread and wine, elements of this world, attests to the goodness of creation as a whole and in a certain way sanctifies it all. The Eucharist belongs not only to believers, but to the entire world. "The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world" (John 6.51) "This is my body" Let us therefore teach Christian workers how to say in their hearts, at the moment of consecration, "Take, eat: this is my body given for you". If offered to God in the Eucharist for the good of his family or for the advancement of society, the sweat of the worker does not end up, as Karl Marx would have us believe, in the product he makes that is then sold for the benefit of the boss, but rather on the altar as part of that bread that, directly or indirectly, he has helped to produce. Labour, then is no longer a cause of alienation, but rather of sanctification. And what does Eucharist have to say to young people? We need think only of one thing. What is it that the world most wants from boys and girls in our day? Nothing but their body. According to the mentality of the world, the body is something to be exploited for pleasure. It is something that can be bought and sold, squeezed for every drop of delight it can deliver as long as it is young and attractive, and then tossed aside, as soon as it no longer serves such purposes. The female body, especially has been made an object to be traded. Let us teach Christian boys and girls also to say, at the moment of consecration, "Take, eat: this is my body, given for you! Consecrated in this way, their body becomes something sacred, not to be looked on as a "tasty dish" for one's own delight or to satisfy the cravings of others. It has become a Eucharist with Christ.
Consecrated people give glory to God with their body when they devote it in an undivided love for Christ to the service of others. Those who marry give glory to God with their body, giving it as a gift of love for the joy of the spouse and for the transmission of life. If the heart of a marriage is in the self-giving of the spouses to each other, it is clear that the Eucharist is the best school where married people can learn how to renew their marriage and keep it alive. But the "body" is more than its sexuality. To say "This is my body", means, for a young person, this is my youth, my beauty, my zest for life, my enthusiasm, my cheerfulness: all the things that I want to make my gift to you! A young person with such Eucharistic sentiments at heart can be a source of light and joy to a whole family, a parish, a whole ecclesial community. And there are many such young people among us. (Continued next issue)
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It
is often said that "the Eucharist makes the Church". Here
we discover how this comes about. The Eucharist makes the Church,
making the Church a Eucharist! The Eucharist is not only the cause
of our sanctity, it is also its form, or its model. Literally, the
"source" and the "summit" of Christian life. Our
holiness must be a Eucharistic holiness. We Christians cannot simply
stop at celebrating the Eucharist: we must be eucharist along with
Jesus (though this time with a small "e").
The
Apostle Paul wrote to the first Christians. "The body is not
meant for fornication it is for the Lord… That is why you should
use your body for the glory of God" (1 Corinthians 6.13.20) There
are two ways, according to the Apostle, in which one can use one's
body to give glory to God: in marriage, or in the unmarried life,
according to each individual vocation and charism See 1 Corinthians
7.:1.
