I am not a morning person. Usually, my best times for work and concentration do not have the letters “a.m.” associated with any of them, and if I’m ever up at 5:00 in the morning, it usually means I’ve made a horrible decision about scheduling a flight out of town. But this past week I was down at the shore, and we were staying right on some tidal wetlands that extended out our back window. One morning last week, well before sunrise, I was completely overwhelmed by what it’s like in a place like that right before the sun comes up. In the midst of darkness, the noise of hundreds, thousands of birds, gradually grows from a few random croaks to an overwhelming din as all these creatures sense that the sun is about to begin a new day. It was like the whole world was waking up and coming to life, it was completely unexpected, and it revealed something about the world that had been completely invisible to me until that moment.
I hope you’re not thinking that I have gone a little soft in the head telling you about a lot of bird noises. Maybe I have, but there’s a point to my telling you about it. And it is that experiences like that are not just nice, they are something we need. We are born with a sense of wonder that God gives us, but over time, we lose it, we shove it down. We decide it’s not manly, or sensible, or cool, or rational, to allow something irrational to overwhelm us so completely that we shed tears, or suddenly see the world as something new. And yet our faith depends on those experiences, they change our hearts and our minds, they are how we find out what God is up to in this world. I suspect somewhere in your life, there have been moments like that for you, when in the faces of your children or in the love you feel surrounding you, you have suddenly seen something that was divine, right next to you.
That brings us to today. Today is the feast of the church year when we celebrate an experience that is meant to be just that overwhelming. If someone ever challenges you on why you bother to be a Catholic, your answer has to be this: it’s that each week, each day really, our life as a church is so totally centered on an experience of eucharist, that same experience of the ordinary becoming completely extraordinary, a world so completely charged with God’s presence that God can be in our midst, taking the form of bread and wine.
Every week, a miracle like that takes place, and being near it is our reason for coming here. Sure, we come here for some quiet time, for a little introspection, and that is valuable. We come here to be with each other and support one another, and that is wonderful too. But we also come here for that miracle, to be near something that occasionally, when we allow it to, can overwhelm us. We are here because need to see it, to be next to it, to hold it in our hand, to drink it in. It is the experience of God breaking into our ordinary world.
This is not a spectacular moment like a movie with lots of special effects. That kind of thrill is over pretty quickly, and it generally leaves us the same person we were before. This is different. God is after us with this eucharist, it takes place not just so we have an experience that overwhelms us, but so that we are transformed by God’s sudden presence here, so that we become Christ’s body and blood.
The late pope John Paul II wrote something once about the eucharist that at the time was very controversial. But he said it anyway. Here’s what he wrote:
In the eucharist our God has shown love in the extreme, overturning every criteria of power which too often govern human relations and radically affirming the principle of service. We cannot delude ourselves: by our mutual love and, in particular, by our concern for those in need we will be recognized as true followers of Christ. This will be how the authenticity of our Eucharistic Celebrations is judged.
Think about what this means. First of all, it means that the eucharist is not about rules, or the right words. We need rubrics, rules that we follow. But they are not what make for authentic liturgy. You can have a liturgy that followed all the rules, and it would not be the authentic sign of Christ’s presence. Second of all, it means that the eucharist is not about how we feel here. You can have a powerful emotional feeling about the eucharist, but even that is not how we know we have authentically celebrated it.
But if we allow this experience of the eucharist to take us over completely, to change our hearts and make us different people, people who give themselves to others as Christ gave himself to us, that is the sign. The eucharist is here to change us. If we serve people, make sacrifices, become people whose first thought is for those who have less than we do, then Christ’s real presence has become real in us. And that is a transformation even more miraculous than the one that takes place on this altar.
The eucharist does not always make this impression on us. We are human, and we are resistant to powerful visions, and we are hard to change. But today on this feast of the body and blood of Christ, it is a good day to pray that some day when we take this miracle into our hands and see it shared with one another, we will see this eucharist for what it is, love in the extreme, and give up our resistance, and be changed ourselves.