I go down to Baystate and Mercy
hospitals now and then to see if I can find any parishioners. In the
olden days, you could walk in, go over a list of patients who had
been admitted and categorized by denomination, and look down the list
for people you might know. Now you can only find them if they have
listed their church and their denomination on their admission form.
But I'm getting off tra here. What I notice more and more is that as
you walk through the halls of the hosptals, everyone is looking at a
smartphone. You can see a mother and father with a baby; the parents
each are attending to their phones instead of the baby. You can see
an elderly woman being pushed by someone who is probably a son, and
he is looking at his smartphone. There was a recent article that
some people consult their smartphones as often as 150 times a day –
that's about every six and one half minutes if they sleep for eight
hours. And the article went on to point out that recent studies have
shown that smart phone addiction is now the second most common cause
of divorce among young married couples.
I think we can all tell why. If you
want to deepen a relationship you have to work at it. That's pretty
straightforward and we all know that. And if you don't put down the
smart phone and actually interact with your beloved you will never
grow that relationship.
We Catholics, along with members of
the Orthodox churches, believe that God has given his priests the
power to take ordinary bread and change it into the Body of Christ;
to take ordinary wine and change it into the Blood of Christ; and of
course we go on to say that now that Christ is resurrected you can't
really separate the body and blood anymore, so that Jesus Christ is
fully present, body and blood, soul and divinity, in the Bread and in
the wine. And that power is given for reasons we can't begin to
fully understand. But part of the reason is that Jesus promised to
be with his church always, even to the end of time, and this is one
of the ways he keeps his promise. And most of us who come to Mass
every week if asked, would probably say that, “Yes, I believe that
Jesus is really present in the sacrament of the Eucharist”. And we
would probably not give it much more thought.
It's interesting that he chose bread
and wine for this sacrament. To the people of Jesus' time, bread was
something like a pita. You used it to pick up pieces of the main
meal or to dip in broth or gravy. Jesus is saying that if you want
the good things the Father has to offer, you need him; he is
essential. People didn't bake bread in individual portions, either.
The dough was kneaded and stretched and placed over a fire on a flat
stone or stuck to the wall of an oven. Indian bread is still made
that way. But that meant you had to share the bread and Jesus means
that as well. As for wine, in Jesus time everyone knew wine was good
for you. If you mixed a little with water, you were less likely to
get sick from the water. If you poured it into an open wound, you
were less likely to get infected. Remember the Good Samaritan story?
But wine also brought joy. People were well aware that wine lowered
your inhibitions, aided your conversation, and helped you take your
mind off your troubles. Of course you could overdo it, but in
moderation the effects were all good. Jesus tells us that he is the
source of healing and joy.
Jesus becomes our food and drink for
many reasons, the primary one, perhaps, being that he wants to form a
relationship with us. He is showing us how far he will go – he
will allow us to consume him, he will seek a union deeper than any we
can have with another human being; Being God, he becomes food and
drink; and being man, his body becomes part of our body, and our
bodies become part of his. Some of our Protestant brothers and
sisters talk about developing a relationship with Jesus; but for us
Catholics that relationship goes far beyond being a friend, or even a
lover.
But we suffer from cell-phone-itis.
Our living, breathing Lord makes himself available to you and I as
food and drink, and we consume him and off we go, immersing ourselves
in our day to day concerns until then next encounter.
We Catholics used to have a
Eucharistic spirituality. We treated the consecrated bread and wine
as we would treat Jesus himself. We did it in ritual, to be sure,
but ritual is the beginning. There was a fence between the
congregation and the altar, not to keep the people away, but to show
that this was holy ground. When the priest consecrated the bread
and wine, he would hold his thumbs and index fingers together until
after communion, because they had touched the body and blood of
Jesus. When communion was distributed the altar servers would hold a
golden paten under the priest's hands, so that if the host were
accidentally dropped, it would be caught. And we were told never to
chew the host, because that was how we ate ordinary food and this was
by no means ordinary food.
And we would have benediction, when we
would take the Blessed Sacrament from the tabernacle and place it in
a monstrance so that people could look at Jesus and commune with Him
in a special way. We still do that, by the way, but only a small
number of our fellow Catholics take advantage of this special time.
And we would have Eucharistic processions in which we would carry our
Lord out into the streets of the city, showing the world that we were
Eucharistic people.
Now I'm not trying to be nostalgic;
I'm not one for saying we should go back to the old ways. But if we
believe in the Real Presence, we should express that belief in our
actions, and the more we do that, the more we will believe, the more
we will come to know Jesus in the breaking of the bread. So today on
this feast of Corpus Christi, the feast of the Body and Blood of
Christ, put down your spiritual cell phones and turn to the one who
has become food and drink to nourish you spiritually, to become one
with you, to give you the means to become like him. Begin a
conversation with him, if even for a short time; make him your only
concern, if even for a few minutes. Speak to him as you would to a
friend, if only for a few words of love. Jesus has become present to
you in what used to be bread and wine; it is up to you and I to
become present to Him.
