Today, Trinity Sunday, I am feeling more relaxed, a bit more energetic. I also have time a quiet. Hence, I felt like writing something today.
We are far too prone to dismiss theology. But I think good theology is more important than it has been for a very long time. One of the concerns that I have about the Eucharistic Revival planned for the Catholic Church throughout the United States for the next few years is the potential for the proliferation of bad eucharistic theology. According to Bishop Cozzens, who is heading this effort for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, the driving force behind this revival is the concern that too many Catholics reject Christ's real presence in the Eucharist.
This concern arises from a survey conducted several years ago. Even Bishop Cozzens, in the press conference rolling out the Eucharistic Revival, was forced to admit, that the survey in question has some problems. In my reading, I think what a lot of people reject is actually in line with Church teaching, namely a physicalist understanding of Christ's real presence.
By "physicalist" I mean understanding Christ's real presence as something like his corporeal body suddenly becoming present on the altar. We then dole it out like turkey at Thanksgiving. My concern is that this is the kind of thing that is going to reinforced. I wonder how much of a cue will be taken from the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum concilium, especially section seven of this important document that sits very high in terms of magisterial teaching.
Section 7 of Sacrosanctum concilium starts with this assertion:
To accomplish so great a work, Christ is always present in His Church, especially in her liturgical celebrations. He is present in the sacrifice of the Mass, not only in the person of His minister, "the same now offering, through the ministry of priests, who formerly offered himself on the cross", but especially under the Eucharistic species. By His power, He is present in the sacraments, so that when a man baptizes it is really Christ Himself who baptizes. He is present in His word, since it is He Himself who speaks when the holy scriptures are read in the Church. He is present, lastly, when the Church prays and sings, for He promised: "Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them" (Matt. 18:20) .What this tells us is that Christ's "real" presence is fourfold. He is present in the gathering of the baptized, in the person of the priest, in the proclamation of the scriptures, and in consecrated bread and wine.
If you think about it, these are not only interrelated, they build on one another. Therefore, the culmination of the Eucharistic liturgy is not the consecration of the elements but the Communion Rite. Of course, Corpus Christi is next week. Perhaps I am getting ahead of myself. While I hesitate to use this kind of language about the Eucharist, there is a way of understanding it that leads to what I can only describe as a type of idolatry. I write that as someone who cherishes time sitting quietly with Christ in the Blessed Sacrament.
In a letter, Henri De Lubac wrote beautifully about the dangers of separating eucharistic adoration from the celebration of the Eucharist. It was De Lubac who, in his work Corpus Mysticum: Essai sur L'Eucharistie et l’Église au moyen âge, demonstrated that over time the referents to the corpus mysticum (i.e., mystical body) and the corpus verum (i.e., true body) had been reversed. He noted some of the ill effects of this reversal. This stands as an example of why good theology matters at the practical level.
Today is Trinity Sunday. There is an important thread that runs from Easter to Ascension to Pentecost to Trinity to Corpus Christi. Ascension and Pentecost, the latter of which marks the beginning of the Church, are part and parcel of the resurrection event. If you pay attention to the liturgical texts for Trinity Sunday, both the Mass and Liturgy of the Hours, and even our Gospel reading for this Year C, you will notice that the Holy Spirit figures prominently, thus linking it closely to Pentecost.
It is the Holy Spirit, sent by the Father and Son, who animates the Church making it, not the mystical Body of Christ, but the true Body of Christ- the verum corpus. It is the mystical Body of Christ (i.e., the Eucharist) that makes the Church the true Body of Christ. Understanding the "mystical" nature of the Eucharist tends to highlight the spiritual nature of the Eucharist. Therefore, moving us away from physicalism. Living as we do in a material world, to quite Madonna, even as religious people, we tend to think the empirical is what is real. For the ancients, the spiritual constituted the real. By contrast, we tend to equate the spiritual with the emphemeral.
It is by participating in and partaking of the Eucharist that we are filled and refilled and then filled again with the Holy Spirit. I am an unapologetic double processionist. That means one who holds, as Catholics confess in the Creed, that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. I will go so far as to assert that the Holy Spirit is the love between the Father and the Son personified.
It is, of course, the Holy Spirit who is called down to transform the bread and the wine into Christ's mystical body and blood. It is the Eucharist (in toto, not just in part, meaning the while eucharistic liturgy), in turn, that makes us the true, that is, "real" Body of Christ- the Body capable of making Christ really and truly present in the world. Because Jesus Christ is autobasalia, which means "the kingdom in person," wherever he is there is God's kingdom.
Grace is nothing other than God sharing divine life with us. The essence of the divine life, the life of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, is agape, self-giving, self-sacrificing love. In baptism, you were immersed in the God who is love. Being a trinity of persons means that God is love. Love that is not narcissistic requires at least a lover and a beloved. But because agape is profuse, it gives life.
Christians are people who have received and seek to give not just life but what Saint Augustine, in a letter to the wealthy Roman widow Proba, called "the life that is truly life." God is love. God is life. God is light. Knowing this, really knowing it, knowing it well enough to communicate it is a matter of experience what is really real, not warmed over paganism.
This brings me back to Christ's real presence. Just as Christ ascended and sent the Spirit not to distance himself from us but to be closer to us than if he had remained, Christ becomes present in the Eucharist only to be present in and through those who partake of it. Our lives constitute the only convincing proof (or disproof) that he is present in the bread and wine. As Michael Card sang: "the mystery of life in Christ is that Christ can live you." Christ lives in us through the Holy Spirit. Where the Spirit is the Father and Son are also.
No comments:
Post a Comment