Unless You Eat My Flesh, Homily for August 16, 2009

This may seem like a diversion. Yesterday we celebrated the feast of the Assumption of Mary into heaven. What we celebrate on that feast is our faith that Mary was assumed body and soul into heaven.
Now, I have to confess that for many years I came to that feast and I would say, "So what? So that's nice for Mary, but what about us?"
Recently I was at a workshop where somebody pointed out something very significant to me. When was it that the church declared that dogma? Anybody know? 1954. What was going on in the world in 1954? We were recovering from the ravages of World War II.
It was toward the end of World War II that I began to read for the first time. So I remember that many books and magazines had pictures of human bodies thrown out like so much trash. I was exposed as a child to pictures of dead human bodies piled up and heaped up from concentration camps, from bombings, from mass massacres.
Let me ask, could you still see those images today in our world, human bodies thrown out like so much trash? Human bodies starved to death? Human bodies victims of massive campaigns of violence?
So what was the Pope trying to do when he declared this dogma? He was saying look, this is what the human body is for! The human body is destined not for death, but for glory! The human body is a wonderful thing. It's meant to be filled with the glory of heaven, and that's what it's destined for.
Do you think that message has relevance for today? Our Catholic faith has always taken the human body and the physical world very seriously. We're not among those who think the body is bad or the world is bad and that being saved means somehow rising above all that. We believe that the material world is good and is meant to be transformed by the glory of God.
We see that in the Gospel today. Did you notice how many times in the Gospel Jesus said, "You've got to eat my flesh and drink my blood?" "My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink" That was a scandal to the people who heard him. And by the way, in the Greek that is used, the Greek shifts its word from a very tame word for eating to a very physical word. So when Jesus says, "Unless you eat my body," he begins to say, "Unless you chew my body, unless you crunch it with your teeth," and the word for eating is like when you're crunching something.
Now, as Catholics we have taken that very seriously, too. I'm not going to try to explain how, but it is our faith that what we eat when we come to communion is really the body of Christ, not just a nice symbol of the body of Christ.
I'm reminded of a great southern writer, Flannery O'Connor, who was once at a cocktail party. And somebody said to her about the Eucharist, "Oh, what a nice symbol."
And Flannery O'Connor said, "If it's just a symbol, the hell with it." We've taken very literally and very seriously that part of the Gospel, and that envisions a whole world vision.
I want to share with you a prayer that you don't hear because we're singing when I say it. When I hold the bread up at the offertory, I say a very beautiful prayer: Blessed are you Lord God of all creation. Through your goodness we have this bread to offer, which earth has given and human hands have made. It will become the bread of life.
Think for a minute of the mystery of all of that. The sun shines and sends light into a plant. What does the plant do with that light energy? Come on, you know basic biology, right? It grows. What else does the plant do? Photosynthesis. It converts light energy into another form of energy that becomes food and nourishment, and we eat it. We become what we eat. So God nurtures the earth and feeds us through the earth.
And we believe that God became flesh and blood. So God took the earth into himself. And when we eat the body of Christ, Christ takes us into himself, and you and I become the body of Christ.
As an aside, if we really believe that  I was watching some of the news coverage of the health care debate the other day, and I was struck by how many millions of members of the body of Christ are without basic health care. Why aren't we outraged about that? Why isn't that the focal point of outrage in our country, that the body of Christ would be without what it needs? We believe that the whole universe is to be taken up into the body of Christ.
There's more here that I could unpack for a minute, but last week I quoted Teilhard de Chardin, a French priest, a paleontologist, who had a mystical sense of God's presence in the world. This is a book called The Divine Milieu. I read it in my twenties and would count it among the list of the most influential books I ever read in my life.
By the way, on the back cover it says, "This book was written for people who have lost faith in institutional religion but believe in life and in the world." And it shows how all of our sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist feed and nurture a faith in the world and in life and in where the world is going.
I hesitate, but I want to read you an excerpt. Throughout his book he has prayers that are just, well, you could spend days thinking on them. This is what he prays about communion and about coming to the altar for communion. I just want to read it to you, and if it confuses you, good. If it opens up a broader perspective, wonderful.

Grant, O God, that when I draw near to the altar to communicate, I may discern from now on the infinite perspectives hidden beneath the smallness and the nearness of the Host in which you are concealed. I have already accustomed myself to seeing, beneath the stillness of that piece of bread, a devouring power which, in the words of your greatest Doctors, far from being consumed by me, consumes me. Give me the strength to rise above the remaining illusions which tend to make me think of your touch as circumscribed and momentary.
I am beginning to understand: under the sacramental species it is primarily through the accidents
of matter that you touch me, but, as a consequence, it is also through the whole universe to the extent that it ebbsand flows over me under your primary influence. In a true sense the arms and the heart you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their deptsh by your will, your tastes and your temperament, converge upon my being to form it, nourish it and bear it along towards the center of your fire. In the Host it is my life that you are offering me, O Jesus.
There's more there than we can possibly comprehend, but think of that as you come to communion today. There is something there which seeks to consume you, and through it God is shaping everything in the world to feed you and to nourish you and to make you part of God's life and God's love.

Quote from Teilhard de Chardin on Eucharist

I quoted this in the homily yesterday and received a lot of inquiries about it. This passage is from Teilhard de Chardin, The Divine Milieu, page 88.

Grant, O God, that when I draw near to the altar to communicate, I may discern from now on the infinite perspectives hidden beneath the smallness and the nearness of the Host in which you are concealed. I have already accustomed myself to seeing, beneath the stillness of that piece of bread, a devouring power which, in the words of your greatest Doctors, far from being consumed by me, consumes me. Give me the strength to rise above the remaining illusions which tend to make me think of your touch as circumscribed and momentary.

I am beginning to understand: under the sacramental species it is primarily through the accidents

of matter that you touch me, but, as a consequence, it is also through the whole universe to the extent that it ebbsand flows over me under your primary influence. In a true sense the arms and the heart you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their deptsh by your will, your tastes and your temperament, converge upon my being to form it, nourish it and bear it along towards the center of your fire. In the Host it is my life that you are offering me, O Jesus.

God Draws us. How?

As I was praying over the readings this weekend, especially the Gospel and that phrase of Jesus, "No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him," I started thinking how does the Father draw us? For whatever reason, I thought of a girl I knew 42 years ago when I taught at a girls' academy that was a boarding school.
This young girl ran away from the school one weekend with a soldier from Fort Harrison. That was quite an upset for a small girls’ academy. Finally, the police found her out of state, and her father went to pick her up. They lived out of town and the following Sunday, he brought her down to talk with me
She described a scene where they were driving along the highway. It was early morning, she looked off to the right and saw the sun rising through the field, and she said she knew everything would be all right. Then she smiled and looked at me and said, "Maybe someday I'll discover that you can find God in church."
In my years as a priest I've met many people who think they don't pray. They think they don't pray because they don't say prayers. They think they don't pray because they don't have experiences that are overtly religious in the sense that the content of their thought is our doctrine or some belief that we have. But i f you listen to them for very long, you know that prayer is happening in their life.
You know it's happening, like with that young girl when she saw the sunrise over a field. It happens sometimes when we notice some little beauty or some thing that we haven't noticed before. It happens when we have feelings of being at one with God's creation. It happens when we feel something drawing us to an awareness of our brothers and sisters and the unity we have with them.
Do you know what I mean? Would you agree with me that those moments are moments of prayer? We may not think of God, we may not think of an explicit religious concept, but I like to think in those moments God is praying in us, and that there is deep within our heart a prayer that is going on constantly. I like to think that in those moments God is drawing us to God's self.
There's a very old and ancient saying attributed to God, and I forget where it came from or who attributed it to God, but the saying goes like this: You wouldn't be looking for me if I hadn't already found you.
I like that and would like to call our attention to it today. When we broaden our consciousness of life, I think we become aware of many ways and many times in which prayer happens in our life. When it happens, sometimes it feels like it's us praying, sometimes it feels like somebody else is praying in us.
Now, how can I tie that together with the Gospel? I believe that the Eucharist we celebrate is broad enough to encompass all those feelings, to be a home for them and to be their fulfillment.
I was reading about a homily of Pope Benedict in the National Catholic Reporter last week. It's one of those liberal Catholic newspapers that I would highly recommended to you, because you'll read all the news about what's happening in the church that you won't read elsewhere.
When I was in my 20s there was aJesuit priest and a paleontologist who had a very mystical sense of evolution and of the whole world evolving toward union with God in Christ. He had an image that one day the whole world would be a cosmic host that we offered to God on the altar.
Well, needless to say, his writings were quickly looked upon with suspicion, and people criticized him for many things. But much to my joy, when I was reading National Catholic Reporter, I noticed that Pope Benedict XVI quoted him in a homily on July 24 when he was on vacation, at a vesper service commenting, and he said this is the vision that Teilhard de Chardin had: That the whole cosmos would be an offering to God, and this is the kind of priest we should try to be, that all of creation becomes awake and alive to God and worshipping God through us.
Well, in the Gospel Jesus says he's the bread of life. This writer, Teilhard de Chardin, said that, yes, God touches us in the Eucharist under the symbol of bread, but he touches us through all of creation. And in this Eucharist God really is feeding us with the bread of life, and in the Eucharist we really are all coming together into one people.
Anyway, just think of that today when you look at the host.
I digress: this is the same Pope who's gone green and who installed solar panels in the Vatican, and who has begun teaching that care for the environment needs to be right up there among our concern as Christians, and has somehow become a green Pope, and in his latest encyclical about the church's social teaching that was released right before he met with president Obama. It drove some people up the wall, because they thought he was endorsing socialism. And of course, you know the church has never endorsed capitalism and has always taught us that we are interconnected.
Anyway, maybe I threw out more than you can handle in one day, and if I did, good. If it bothers you, good. Think about it, and maybe think about those areas and movements in your life where the Father may be drawing you closer to Jesus.
The vision presented to us in the Eucharist, in the writings of the mystics and seemingly acknowledged by the Pope is that the whole of creation is being drawn together by God into one cosmic unity, one host offered to the Father through Jesus. Think of it. Maybe those moments of prayer that you don’t consider prayer are part of this movement of God’s Spirit in God’s creation.

Food that lasts: from where does it come?

When I was much younger I would read the Scriptures with certainty that I would have been on the side of the good people, that I would have been among the faithful people following Jesus, that I would have been among the crowd that didn't grumble, and that, had I been there, I would have been one of the good people.
The older I get, the more convinced I am that, had I been there, I would have been among the crowds who were grumbling, and I would have been among those who were asking for a sign, and I'm not at all certain that I would have been in the good group.
You know, it was not easy to follow Moses to the promised land. What did they get? In one view of the story they left slavery, they left exile in a foreign land and came into their own land. As the story unfolds, they leave behind a place where they had enough to eat, where life was hard but they knew what the problems were, and they went out into the desert where they had nothing to eat. So they said to Moses, "Why did you lead us out into this wilderness with nothing to eat?"
The crowds followed Jesus into the wilderness. Think of those crowds following. As long as they're getting what they want, they follow enthusiastically. They loved it when Jesus spoke back to the scribes and the Pharisees, and they loved to watch him put them down. But they quickly abandoned him.
Where do you think you'd be if you were there in that crowd? Just ask yourself the question and wonder, would you be among the grumblers, or would you be among those who followed?
As I thought of these readings today, I thought of the debates in our country and in our society, and I thought of the newspapers that I read, especially the online stuff where they have these instant headlines. Do you know what I'm struck by? No matter what the issue, the headline is, "What will this cost you?" or, "What will it do for you?" No matter what the issue, the headlines are always pointing out the conflict. It's almost as if the media wants to start a fight and step back and watch it, and almost as if they assume that all of us are motivated only by our own self interest and only by our own pocketbook.
Against all that background, listen to the words of Jesus again in the Gospel today. What advice would he give us as part of the crowd? "Don't work for what perishes, but work for what will last forever." Can you feel that hunger within you and also the dissatisfaction? If I had a lot of time, I'd ask you to make a list of all the things you bought that failed to satisfy you, all the things that you invest your time and energy in that didn't last. Can you hear Jesus today saying, "Don't work for the food that perishes, but work for food that lasts forever"?
I think another piece of advice he would give us is don't ask, “What's in it for me?” but ask how do you know that you're doing what God wants in the world. Did you ever notice in the headlines in the paper, they never ask you what is the just thing to do, what is that love calls us to do. They always appeal to something else, usually our crass self-interest.
So Jesus might ask us, "Ask yourself, 'How do I know that I am doing the work of God?'" Then he might lead you beyond that to say, "Ask not what you're doing, but ask from what place of communion or union within your heart does what you're doing flow?"
Finally, can you hear him say, "Trust me. I am the bread of life. I am the bread that satisfies, and I am with you here as we worship today"?
Anyway, just some questions to ask yourself and maybe to be with as we worship today: How do I know that I am doing the work of God, and what place deep within me do my thoughts and my actions flow from? How do my thoughts and actions flow into the world? Do they flow in accord with God's love and God's justice, or do they flow with some other spirit?