Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

Holy Cross Monastery, West Park, NY

Br. Ephrem Arcement, OHC

Corpus Christi, June 19, 2025

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Feast of Corpus Christi

“In Your Bread there is hidden the Spirit who is not consumed,

in Your Wine there dwells the Fire that is not drunk:

the Spirit is in Your Bread, the Fire in Your Wine—

a manifest wonder, that our lips have received.” –St. Ephrem

My personal relationship with the Eucharist has taken many turns over the course of my life.  Born into a Roman Catholic family, I distinctly remember making my first communion in second grade.  Tellingly, I have to admit that I recall my class practicing receiving communion more than the actual ceremony itself.  As an eight-year-old, my curiosity was peaked: how will the wafer taste?  What if I drop it?  What do I do if it sticks to the roof of my pallet?  My teacher prepped us well, and the ceremony went on without a fuss.  But why do I remember the logistics of receiving communion and have almost no recollection of the meaning and significance of the reality that I was receiving?  As I look back, what was important was that I made my first communion, not that I actually entered into communion with the Body and Blood of Christ…and these two realities are hardly the same.

When I look back on my Catholic childhood, I see that I, like many others, was sacramentalized without really being evangelized.  When, at 16 I came into contact with the gospel in a way that I could more fully understand (through a Baptist friend of mine), I began to resent the fact that my Catholic upbringing, as I experienced it, put so much stock in the sacraments and so little in helping me develop my personal faith in which and on which the sacraments are based.  So, I did what many evangelicals tend to do, throw the baby out with the bathwater and focus entirely on the personal to the exclusion of the sacramental, which, I thought, had become not a means of grace but its obstacle.  

Several years go by before the next turn in my journey with the Eucharist.  Now in divinity school and studying under professors of various Christian denominations, I came in contact with both mainline Protestants and faith-filled Roman Catholics who embodied a more holistic approach when it came to the sacraments.  Faith and sacrament could be lived out where each served and enhanced the other rather than threatened it.  It was my first exposure to a both/and consciousness and my way out of the either/or consciousness that I detoured into during my evangelical years.  Up until then, I knew what it was like to have the sacraments with little to no faith.  I knew what it was like to have faith with little to no sacraments.  Now I knew what it was like to have both faith and sacraments and the fullness of the experience of Christ in the coming together of the two.

Since returning to the more sacramental expressions of Christianity, I have often thought to myself, and sometimes expressed to others, that I could never again be a part of a tradition that doesn’t place the Eucharist at the center of its life and worship.  As much as I have benefited from these more non-liturgical traditions, for me there is one glaring omission: the sacramental encounter with the real presence of Christ communicated to me in the physical elements of bread and wine.  Preaching is very important but may fail to inspire.  I may or may not feel the Spirit move amongst the congregation.  I may not have it within me to have a genuine encounter with God when I offer myself in worship.  But one thing that I know for certain is that, in the Eucharist, God encounters me.  I taste, I chew and eat, I drink and swallow, and I feel the wine burn in my belly and am confirmed that once again I am loved beyond measure.

The Eucharist is one of those Christian mysteries that is polyvalent in nature:  it means many things at the same time.  From today’s readings we see that the prototype of the Eucharist, the manna from heaven, signified God’s provision for God’s people struggling along their journey of faith through the wilderness.  It was a sign of God’s fidelity and care. 

Jesus would use these meanings and attach them to himself and his imminent crucifixion at the Last Supper.  God is now demonstrating a new kind of fidelity and care for God’s people…one that is no longer bound to the temporal realm of our wilderness journeys but one that gives us a taste of a far greater reality.  If the primary function of the manna was to get Israel out of the wilderness, the primary function of the Eucharist is to allow Christ to enter more deeply back into the wilderness, the wilderness of our lives…to not just sustain us and care for us along the way…but to transform us and to open up to us a new, deeper realm of being in the wilderness.  What the Eucharist bestows is not just physical bread and wine, but a type of bread and wine full of power and glory…the exact same power and glory which was manifested in Christ’s death and resurrection.  In each Eucharist heaven invades earth and God knocks on the door of our hearts seeking entrance.  And what God seeks is communion…a mutual sharing where human and divine become one in the gift of each to the other.  Heaven becomes one with earth and the veil between the two is rent asunder.  

What results, or at least what should result, is not a way of life that seeks to escape from our earthly, often messy, embodied existence but a life which is more capable of embodying the divine and manifesting Christ in our own earthly, often messy, existence: “The cup of blessing that we bless, it it not a sharing in the blood of Christ?  The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ?”  Especially in the Eucharist, the church becomes the body of Christ, not in metaphor but in sacramental/mystical reality.  

No one has explicated the implications of this sacramental reality for the contemporary church, in my mind, more that the twentieth century Jesuit scientist and theologian Teilhard de Chardin.  Teilhard saw the Eucharist as the indispensable reality in the ongoing incarnation and, what he called, chrsitification of matter.  For Teilhard, the evolutionary impulse was something divinely inspired, fueled by the love of God…that which is taking on more and more of the divine life in its gradual unfolding.  Spirit and matter, for Teilhard, were not separate realities…there was only spirit-matter: two interdependent dimensions of one reality.  Teilhard saw all of creation as sacramental with the Eucharist being the Sacrament of sacraments.  The cosmic Christ is arising in creation, especially in the church, and especially in those who share in the Body and Blood of Christ and join their own bodies and their own blood to this cosmic Christ communicated in this Sacrament of sacraments.  Created reality reaches its climax in the Incarnation whose end is not the crucifixion, or even the resurrection, but the Omega Point when all creation is assumed and transfigured by the Body and Blood of Christ.  As he writes, “And then there appears to the dazzled eyes of the believer the eucharistic mystery itself, extended infinitely into a veritable universal transubstantiation in which the words of the consecration are applied not only to the sacrificial bread and wine but, mark you, to the whole mass of joys and sufferings produced by the convergence of the world as it progresses.”

As a true mystic, Teilhard, at this point, can’t help but burst into ecstatic prayer, one of the most profound reflections on the Eucharist that I’ve come across:  “In a true sense the arms and the heart which you open to me are nothing less than all the united powers of the world which, penetrated and permeated to their depths by your will, your tastes, and your temperament, converge upon my being to form it, nourish it, and bear it along toward the center of your fire.  In the host it is my life that you are offering me, O Jesus.  What can I do to gather up and answer that universal and enveloping embrace?  To the total offer that is made me, I can only answer by a total acceptance.  I shall therefore react to the eucharistic contact with the entire effort of my life — of my life of today and of my life of tomorrow, of my personal life and of my life as linked to all other lives.  Periodically, the sacred species may perhaps fade away in me.  But each time they will leave me a little more deeply engulfed in the layers of your omnipresence: living and dying, I shall never at any moment cease to move forward in you.  The eucharist must invade my life.  My life must become, as a result of the sacrament, an unlimited and endless contact with you, that life which seemed, a few moments ago, like a baptism with you in the waters of the world, now reveals itself to me as communion with you through the world.  It is the sacrament of life.  The sacrament of my life — of my life received, of my life lived, of my life surrendered….”

May God give us eyes to see as Teilhard saw and a like hunger to live in the same sacramental world full of God’s fire and glory.  Amen.