The Bishops of this country recently held a large Eucharistic Congress which included a pilgrimage to the Congress held in Indianapolis. Comments from the chair of the national bishops conference indicated that it was a great success: ‘Dreams come true’: Bishop Cozzens looks back on the Eucharistic Congress | America Magazine They held this congress because they sense (know) that many/most Catholics have no clue about the meaning of the real presence of Christ in the bread and wine of holy communion.
I’m guessing they’re right about most Catholics. Count me as one of them. Though I doubt the Congress do much to resolve this problem (if it is, indeed, a problem).
So I want to try to share some thoughts about what I see as the many meanings of “holy communion”.
Yet, as with recent postings, I want to warn that I write within my ongoing “brainfog” of forgetting all sorts of important facts and ideas and often being confused about this and that and failing to punctuate correctly. And failing to say things correctly or adequately — something I should perhaps call “word fog”.
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Let me begin with the idea and the reality of analogy – what the experts refer to by its Latin/scholastic name “the analogia entis” (the analogy of being).
What I think I know about this idea I’ve learned from my mentor Bill Lynch, SJ, for whom it was central to his thinking. (If you wish to read him in the original, check out the specific chapters in his great book Christ and Apollo, 1960.) There Lynch was especially concerned to criticize what he saw as the presence of “the univocal” in so much contemporary writing and cinema and thinking – the endless pounding home of the same idea in every part of a play or novel, film or campaign. In opposition to this constant univocity, he called for a renewal of an analogical sensibility.
To understand and recognize the univocal sensibility, think about the repetitious character of the representation of violence in contemporary cinema. Bad guys shot or blown to pieces endlessly. Good guys doing the killing. Yet, Lynch would argue, talk to anyone who’s experienced violence (in war, on our streets, in our schools…) and you’ll soon understand that actual violence, while always the same (always leading to wounding or death) is also always different.
And that is the gist of the idea of analogy. Ideas and real things or actual existents are always at once the same and different. They are the same, all realities or existent beings. Yet they are all different, each its own form of reality. They are analogous.
Hope this helps a bit. Hope what follows may lead to further understanding.
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Communion is an analogous concept and reality.
We each seek to be “in communion” with other realities, persons and nature. We especially seek to be in communion with ourselves.
In the latter case we think of it as integrity – a wholeness achieved within the many different “parts” of ourselves. A wholeness of body and mind, brain and spirit, feeling and thinking. These “parts” of ourselves (and many others) really are different, yet they are all one, all one’s self. (The philosophically inclined might here want to check out Bill Lynch’s important but difficult collection of essays titled The Integrating Mind, 1962.)
Fragmentation and alienation are the lack of such integration. The mentally ill are one instance of such, whether bi-polar or schizophrenic or many other forms of such illness. And we are all, Lynch says wryly but truly, more than somewhat mentally ill – more than a bit fragmented and lacking integration.
Now think about communion with others – whether in love and marriage and family or in communities and societies of various kinds. What we seek is a true oneness within real difference. Yet what we too often find is the dominance of one person or power, of one idea and ideology. Something which allows no real differentiation. Or we find the opposite form of dis-integration, individual rights unconnected with obligations, freedom run amok.
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As our awareness of the environmental crisis grows, we seek greater communion with the natural world – because we realize that the absence of such communion is the root cause of the crisis. Human domination of nature by the rape of nature’s resources, by the logging industries (cutting forests to supply us with supersoft toilet paper), by the coal and oil industries (who continue to advertise on TV that they really are eco-friendly), by auto and all transport industries.
Read Francis about all this. He says it far better than I, in several encyclicals, many lectures, in preaching and prayers.
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A further way to think about analogy is to see it as a form of thinking which always seeks a both-and rather than an either-or, in thinking and speaking as well as in noticing and observing. (Here again, check out Lynch’s collection of essays titled The Integrating Mind).
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So back, if I can, to “holy communion”.
At Mass, we approach the altar and the minister, and then as we eat the bread and drink the cup.
(Personally, I hate the thin wafers substituting for bread at most Catholic masses, but love those liturgies – rarely RC – which use real bread, broken in pieces from a large loaf. Just as I love RC liturgies which use real, even if poor quality, wine and hate those protestant communions which for some strange reasons refuse to use real wine and substitute some silly grape juice.)
I believe this bread and wine to be the body and blood of Jesus. For me this is an act of faith which I maintain because my ancestors (Mom and Dad and all their predecessors) so believed, and because New Testament accounts say that Jesus proclaimed it as such – what Jesus said to his friends at his last supper with them, and what he told us to do likewise.
Yet, as I’ve said, I’m not at all sure what it means. As Catholics proclaim, shortly after the consecration of the bread and wine, “This is the Mystery of Faith”.
So it’s an act of faith and piety for me.
But also something analogous to all the many aforementioned forms of communion.
Yes, it also puts me into communion with all the others present in the church (or out in the open air – something not permitted, though occasionally practiced, in the Archdiocese of Denver). And, as one of the post-consecration prayers reminds us, it also puts me in communion with all the other members of the church, the living and those gone ahead of us. (I don’t particularly like the precedence for the clergy noted in those prayers, but that’s a long-standing problem for me.)
I probably should also say something about “the Body of Christ” since it’s one of my favorite beliefs and experiences – like when I sit outside Union Station with my dog or having a beer at one of the local establishments and see this passing stream of all types of folks (old and young, tough and tame, beautiful and wrinkled, brown and black and white and yellow and occasionally red) and say to myself “this is indeed the body of Christ”.
And I probably should also say something about those words from the centurion that “I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the words….”
And more (like the need for women priests), but I’ve already said more than enough.
So I hope that some of this makes some sense and (as always) I’d love to hear your thoughts in response. As to the Bishops and their crusade, I remain skeptical even as I vaguely remember that, at a similar event many years ago, both Mother Theresa and Dorothy Day showed up and received communion. Good for them, so it probably should be good enough for me
