I've spent a while filleting back issues of The Tablet, passed on to me by my friend Derek. The Tablet is one of the main Journals of contemporary Catholicism in which news, opinion, cultural comment, theological and ethical issues and much more are explored from a faithful but critical Catholic persepctive. One of the regulars is Father Daniel O'Leary whose columns contain some of the best spiritual writing around on the graced gift that is life in a God-loved world. In the 24th August 2013 issue (I told you they were back issues!!!), he wrote about the Eucharist as the feast of the love of God.
Quoting St Symeon the New Theologian he then moved on to celebrate the Eucharist as a deeply transformative re-reception of the embodied grace of God in the sacrament of bread and wine. At the miracle of communion:
…. everything that is hurt, everything
that seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
maimed, ugly, irreparably
damaged, is in him transformed
and recognised as whole, as lovely,
and radiant in his light
he awakens as the beloved
in every last part of our body.
O'Leary goes on: "These infinitely intimate experiences of our sacred senses …purify and confirm our graced potential, for recognising God's bread in every bread, God's incarnate body in every human body, God's own need in every need. And we do not just receive the holy bread….we become it.
In becoming it we are gifted with our true identity. Reputations, titles, possessions, power and prestige do not determine our identity. They die when we die. Who we are before ourselves and our God is who forever we are. And we become the blessed bread and wine not just for ourselves, as Pope Francis preached recently, we become it to light the way for others.
That is one of the most penetrating and generous expositions of the Eucharist I've read in a long while. Leaving aside the theological pragmatism many others indulge in trying to reduce the miracle to the spiritual technology of God's workings, what Daniel O'Leary offers here is a glad receiving, and faithful living into our true identity as the Body of Christ, a regular recovery and rediscovery of our graced potential, a thankful taking of the bread for which we hunger and thirst, as we hunger and thirst for righteousness, for justice and and for peace in a reconciled world.
Father O'Leary goes on:
It is in the ordinariness, accessibility and blessing of bread that this ravishing love incarnate is experienced and celebrated. And it is the sacramentality of the celebration that reveals a most comforting truth; in all our daily efforts to be human and loving, eucharistic grace is always surrounding us, enfolding us, empowering and consecrating us.
Like R S Thomas at the end of his poem, 'The Moor', I read this and then
I walked on
Simple and poor, while the air crumbled
And broke on me generously as bread.
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