Where words and senses fail

​​Throughout my four years of diaconal formation, I have asked Jesus to reveal His presence to me in the Eucharist. My empirical brain fought hard against the word “real,” however, and for many months now, my prayer life has centred around my hunger to experience the real presence. 

When I started formation, I intellectually understood the profound symbolism of how the Eucharist creates unity from diversity. I believe St. Augustine was the first to note that Our Lord gave us His Body and His Blood under the species of things that are made one out of many. A loaf of bread is made from many grains of wheat, and a bottle of wine is made from many grapes. In a similar way, the unified Body of Christ is established from the diversity of its individual members.
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I also revered the Eucharist as a great charity. “Do you wish to honour the Body of Christ?” Thomas Merton asks. “Then do not disdain him when you see him in rags.” Merton further observes that “it would be of little value for an individual to be united to the Head of the Mystical Body if he were not, by that fact also, united with its members.” Merton is saying here that the Eucharist is not a private experience. Rather, Holy Communion manifests an interconnected obligation between Creator and creature where we cannot separate Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist from His real presence in other people. The Eucharist offers us the perfect charity of eternal life while demanding that we demonstrate charity in this one.

Once, I was lost in a used bookstore and found a beautiful little volume entitled The Aquinas Prayer Book. Aquinas will forever be attached to the Feast of Corpus Christi because of the poem Pange Lingua which includes that delicious line: “faith for all defects supplying, when the feeble senses fail.”          

I am not much interested in Aquinas, the towering intellect. I have never been moved by his five arguments for God’s existence, but I am interested in Aquinas, the mystic, who was so enraptured by a divine encounter during Mass that one of human history’s most prolific philosophers put down his quill for good and never wrote another word. In his prayers, Aquinas describes his intimate connection with the Lord in four simple lines

Being born, He became our friend.
At supper, He became our food.
Dying, He was our ransom’s price
And, reigning, is our eternal good.

Aquinas proclaimed that the Eucharist animated every aspect of his life and gave meaning to his death by calling the Eucharist the “delight and pleasure of my soul, my strength and salvation in all my temptations, my joy and peace in every trial, my light and guide in every deed, and my final protection in death.” St. Thomas would pray when he elevated Jesus in the host, “I trust what God’s own Son has said.” Amen. That’s a powerful, simple prayer. I trust what God’s own Son has said: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst…I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (John 6: 35, 51). 

Merton notes that in the parable of the king who made a marriage feast for his son, “there is always difficulty in getting the guests to assemble.” It’s difficult, yes, but the wedding banquet remains a gathering force that I experience every time I serve as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. 

Since being installed as an Acolyte by Bishop McGrattan last September, I have served as an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion at least twice a week. In this ministry, Jesus uniquely revealed His substantial presence to me in the intimate encounter of distributing His Body and Blood to those who accept the invitation to the banquet and follow his commandment to “do this in memory of me.”
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As the pilgrims come with outstretched hands or on bended knees, layers of alienation, separation, and self-concern fall away. My heart dissolves into Trinitarian Love like the Eucharist that dissolves on my tongue. Awe and wonder replace my futile attempts to understand God. Instead, I see His supernatural power at work restoring those who love Him. In a world where I can trust nothing else and least of all myself, I trust what God’s own Son has said: “that they may be one just as we are... as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us..." (John 17:11, 21).

When I feed the spiritually hungry God’s supersubstantial bread, I stand as dumbstruck as Job when God asked him: “Is it by your understanding that the hawk soars, that he spreads his wings to the south?” No. It is not by my understanding that in this place where words and feeble senses fail, I know Jesus descends to feed us, fill us, and give us the strength to follow Him in the Eucharist. ​

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Written by Jason Openo, St. Patrick's, Medicine Hat, Permanent Diaconate Candidate for the Diocese of Calgary.