OF BODIES, AND OF GIVING

I translate and reproduce here a homily for Corpus Christi by Brother Benoît Mailleux of the Belgian Community of Tibériade, for its simplicity, its honesty and its vast overtones.

Dear brothers and sisters,

The Eucharist is God giving in. Yes, God couldn’t resist it. After having manifested the greatest possible love by giving his life for us, he couldn’t bear the thought of once again being distant, hidden from our view as in the first Covenant. He is and remains Emmanuel, “God-with-us”. Obviously there is still a play of hide-and-seek in that eucharistic presence, which reminds us a little of the play of mutual seeking and finding in the Song of Songs. God gives himself, even as he desires to be sought by the faith and the desire of the faithful. Hence, at the beginning of each eucharistic celebration, we should remember the intensity of Jesus’s words: “I have wished with a great desire to eat this Passover with you!” Is that desire mutual? Do we thirst for that encounter? Are we hungry for God?

I should like to evoke three aspects of this great Mystery of the Eucharist.

1. The sacrament of the poor.

And the poor man, first of all, is the Lord. The eucharist celebrates the victory of a broken body, of a man humiliated. The divine light shines from a pierced flank. We are in the presence of the gift of the Crucified and Resurrected who has conquered hate and death; and who gives himself over to us. The eucharist expresses the poverty of God who gives himself into our hands under the kinds of bread and wine, transformed, transubstantiated by the Holy Spirit. And once again he runs the risk that we may do with it as we please. 

On the other hand, there is also the poverty of man, who cannot live without that bread, the bread of the Word, the bread of the forgiveness which lies at the heart of each celebration, and that living bread of Heaven that is Jesus. The first reading reminds us that to be able to eat the manna the Hebrews needed to know hunger, the poverty of that life in the desert which reduced them to their deepest selves, crying out to God. So is it for us as we encounter the eucharist. In receiving the body and blood of Christ, we live the poverty in giving thanks. And before “giving thanks [gratias]” to God, we are conscious of “receiving that grace [gratia]”. The eucharist teaches us to receive, to live in gratitude. We do not lay hands on this gift of God; we open our hands to it, we hold them out to it, to receive it. And so this attitude of poverty and openness becomes my attitude toward the other. The eucharist  stops me from “wanting to possess”, from “wanting to take hold of”. I do not lay hands on the other and I do not use him. The love of Christ in the eucharist becomes a genuine love of the other. As St Theresa put it, “The more I am united to Him, the more I love all my sisters.”

2. The great question.

The gift of manna is also the gift of the question. That bread which fed the Hebrews in the desert is at the same time the bread of questioning: Mân Hou?  What is it? And it is the questioning that permits the continuing journey. Here, the true bread that comes down from heaven is Christ Jesus. And it – he – does not come as the answer to everything. He also brings with him a question, the great question: do you love me? Cardinal Suentes said that  that is the only question that will remain and the only question that is worth while . . . And to that, everyone must work out one’s own answer, rather than copying St Peter’s.

3. Becoming what we receive.

This great gift of the eucharist: we receive it, it gives us life, and we distribute it in the Church. Henri de Lubac put it in this apt phrase: “The Church creates the Eucharist and the Eucharist creates the Church.” And indeed, it is the eucharist that makes us into the Church. St Paul reminded us that “many as we are, we are one body, because all share one bread.” We are not united here by similar tastes or by similar expectations; we are united by the risen Christ. And it is the shared hearing of his Word, the communion of his Body and Blood, that shape our unity and make of us his Body.

That communion becomes our commitment. “He who eats me will live by me.” In other words, it is the feelings of Christ, the will of Christ, the love of Christ for his Father and for men, that must invade us and take possession of our being, day after day. And the Church does not exist for itself, but to carry unto the ends of the world the Risen Christ and God’s “I love you”.  One might quote the words of Etty Hillesum (replacing “the office” by “the Mass”): “I thank you for having drawn me out of the peace of this Mass to throw me into the suffering and the troubles of these times. It would be easy to have an idyll with you in the protected atmosphere of a Mass, but what matters is to take you with me everywhere, intact, and to remain faithful to you whatever befalls.”

Prior Christophe of the Tibhirine monastery wrote, about his community, “Lord, there are seven of us here. Take us, grant grace to this crumb of nothing-much . . . and share it out for all those out there.” We too could adopt that prayer for our families, our groups, our communities or for ourselves individually: “Lord, take us, grant grace to this crumb of nothing-much, and share it out for all those out there.” Amen.

 

HINTS FOR BUSY TRAVELLERS

“I am the way, the truth, and the life.” If he is the way, where does it lead? To the Father, obviously. It cannot be a long way: “He who has seen me has seen the Father.” To emerge from the metaphor: what is the way that he is? “To keep my commandments.” What are they? “My yoke is easy, my burden is light.” The Jewish law counted 613 commandments: to keep them all was essential; to keep them all was impossible. An imperative that is both essential and impossible generates the greatest possible degree of stress. What replaced them? “To love your  God with all your heart and all your soul and all your mind and all your strength.” And: “To love your neighbour as yourself.” Simple. All he asks is everything. And yet, supposedly this is a light burden and an easy yoke. How can that be? 

The first one is the biggie, even if we usually think only of the second one. And it bothers us. How, if you are not a saint, can you love God? Assuming, that is, that He exists. Can you love a Supreme Being who lets tsunamis drown thousands and who lets grown men and women torture 3-year-olds? Well, shall we for moment stop blaming him for what we, as humans, do? Think differently. “Heaven and earth are full of thy glory.” Think of the sunset’s afterglow on mountain tops in clear cold air. Think of the robin’s beady eye outside your winter window, waiting for breadcrumbs. Think of the surprising smile and kindness of an overworked hospital nurse. Think of the gaunt medic, always helping one more bomb victim with the last of his own strength. Hints, just hints. But hints of that glory that fills the earth as, we are told, it fills heaven. And if we learn to see them as the gifts they are, we may learn to love the giver. After a long life with a heart turned, and tuned, to heaven Josef Ratzinger’s last words were “Signore, ti amo”.

Loving your neighbour as yourself is only apparently easier. It may be your mother-in-law, your boss, your teenager, the guy across the street or the Head of State. First, remember that (s)he is only, for present purposes, your neighbour if s(he) actually enters your daily life. The story he told to illustrate the question is that of the traveller left robbed and bleeding by brigands by the side of the road. A priest came by, saw him, and muttered, “Sorry, but I’m late for Mass” and hurried on. A Levite came by, saw him, and thought, “Oh no, if I stop and help him with all that nasty blood I’ll have to spend a whole day or week re-purifying myself for the Temple service,” and hurried on. Then a foreign businessman came by and saw him. He stopped, got the first aid kit out of his car and did some careful disinfecting and bandaging. He put the man into the passenger seat and drove him to the nearest inn (this was before cell phones), and left him with the landlord, saying “Do what needs doing for him, I’ll pay for everything when I come back next week.” And, leaving a wedge of cash on account, he went off and continued his business trip. 

Come to think of it, this is a startlingly unromantic story. The businessman did not go into floods of sympathetic tears; he did not get converted and start an NGO for helping battered travellers; he did the minimum and went on with is life. That teaches us something about that second commandment. It doesn’t ask for your heart and soul: it asks for you to DO something when you stumble upon a need that you can do something about. Perhaps that is what he meant when he talked about light yokes. When all is temporarily well with you, remember to be thankful. When you turn a corner and see a need, do what you can. That’s all; but that is also everything.

It’s part of the way. It’s part of the truth. It’s part of the life. Once you are on the way, you are in the truth, and you have the life. [And if you want the whole vast and cosmic giant echo to your little charcoal-burner’s day, you are on the way to the Father, you are in the truth of the Son, and you have the life of the Holy Spirit. Signore, ti amo.]

             Image: Duccio di Buoninsegna (Siena, d. 1319), Jesus Teaching the Disciples