By The Rev. Canon Joanne Davies, Oblate, SSJD
Jesus, consume me with Your love as I consume You.
As a hospital Chaplain…I have been asked, what is happening when I eat the bread and drink the wine?….More times than I ever expected in the hospital, right at the moment when I was giving communion to a patient. And not necessarily at bedside but often right at the moment of communion in the chapel service. Prayerfully, hopefully, in those present seconds, I’d say…You are receiving Christ’s life and love within you.
Corpus Christi. Celebrating the real presence of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharistic feast. The fullness of Thanksgiving for Holy Communion.
I offer Malcolm Guite’s words…
…this is how He comes. Through wine and bread
Love chooses to be emptied into me.
He does not come in unimagined light
Too bright to be denied, too absolute
For consciousness, too strong for sight,
Leaving the seer blind, the poet mute;
Chooses instead to seep into each sense…
We come in prayer to the Eucharist. We are being called by Christ, into the midst of the Trinity – we open our time and ourselves to intentionally honour and reverence Christ’s presence in us, with us, and around us. And just as his words spoken changed the bread and wine with his first disciples, his words spoken change the bread and wine with us, not by sight or taste but in the prayer giving new life, over and over. Feeding us. We are embodied spirits, we receive the true embodied presence of Love in the bread and wine.
St. Augustine said in the 5th Century “It is your Mystery, the Mystery of your life that has been placed on the altar” for the Eucharist. The fullness of Thanksgiving. Christ’s body and blood given to us. And we receive the bread and wine as those first disciples did. We receive in Thanksgiving. It is called The Lord’s Supper because we celebrate a memory of the meal before Jesus’ sacrifice of love and forgiveness. It is called Holy Communion because Jesus shares his life of grace with us. The risen Christ is present in the life of our body. We celebrate this. We become one with Christ by receiving him. Taking the bread and the wine in faith. Taking the bread and wine to hold the love and way in life as Jesus asked of us, we change too, inwardly on the journey of knowing ourselves as God knows us and outwardly to life around us. And it is called Holy Mass (meaning holy sending) because it brings us and then sends us to live into God’s mission of Love.
The doctrine of Corpus Christi speaks of the features of bread and wine remaining; the distinction is that the underlying reality of bread and wine are transformed, not destroyed or replaced. I have no desire, or ability nor do I want to dance on the head of the pin in defining and refining how the Real Presence of Christ happens in or to the Bread and Wine…. I am quite content with “more than we can ask or imagine. And believing wholeheartedly, and knowing gratefully, the Real Presence.
Cardinal Ratizinger – who you many better know as Pope Benedict – in reflection on the doctrine, wrote from his heart instead, saying the feast of Corpus Christi tells us: Yes, there is such a thing as love, and therefore there is transformation, therefore there is hope. And hope gives us the strength to live and face the world.