anymore; we begin to chew on it. Jesus did not say, “Think about this” or “Stare
at this” or even “Worship this.” Instead he said, “Eat this!”
We must move our knowing to the bodily, cellular, participative, and thus
unitive level. We must keep eating and drinking the Mystery, until one day it
dawns on us, in an undefended moment, “My God, I really am what I eat! I also
am the Body of Christ.” Then we can henceforth trust and allow what has been
true since the first moment of our existence. As I mentioned before, the
Eucharist should operate like a stun gun, not just a pretty ceremony. We have
dignity and power flowing through us in our bare and naked existence—and
everybody else does too, even though most do not know it. A body awareness of
this sort is enough to steer and empower our entire faith life, while merely
assenting to or saying the words will never give us the jolt we need to absorb
the divine desire for us—and for Itself. Frankly, we’re talking about the
difference between receiving a sincere Valentine’s Day card that says, “I love
you,” and making physical, naked, and tender love to someone you deeply care
about and who cares for you. Why are we so afraid of that?
This is why I must hold to the orthodox belief that there is Real Presence in
the bread and wine. For me, if we sacrifice Reality in the elements, we end up
sacrificing the same Reality in ourselves. As Flannery O’Connor once declared:
“Well, if it is just a symbol, to hell with it!”*
The Eucharist then becomes our ongoing touchstone for the Christian
journey, a place to which we must repeatedly return in order to find our face,
our name, our absolute identity, who we are in Christ, and thus who we are
forever. We are not just humans having a God experience. The Eucharist tells us
that, in some mysterious way, we are God having a human experience!
This continues in Romans 8:18–25 (as creation), 1 Corinthians 10:16ff. and
11:23ff. (as bread and wine), and in 12:12ff. (as people). In each of these
Scriptures, and in an ever-expanding sense, Paul expresses his full belief that
there is a real transfer of human and spiritual identity from Christ to Creation,
to the elements of bread and wine, and through them to human beings. The
Great Circle of Inclusion (the Trinity) is a centrifugal force that will finally pull
everything back into itself—exactly as many physicists predict will happen to
the universe the moment it finally stops expanding. They call it the “Big
Crunch,” and some even say it will take a nanosecond to happen. (Could this be
a real description of the “Second Coming of Christ”? Or the “Final Judgment”? I
think so.)
Thus Eucharist, like Resurrection, is not a unique event or strange anomaly.