A Eucharistic Way of Life

Some fifty years ago, I spent a five-day retreat on a small island off the coast of Mystic, Connecticut. On each day of the retreat, I concentrated my meditation upon a chapter of Saint Paul’s Letter to the Colossians. It was one of the richest retreat experiences I’ve had: one that implanted in me the lasting conviction of the surpassing importance of this singular New Testament writing.

Scarcely any other passage in the New Testament offers so concise yet complete an expression of the substance of Christian faith as the Christological hymn found in the Letter’s first chapter (Col 1:15-20). It opens with its famous prelude: “He is the Image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation,” rises to a crescendo: “in him all things hold together,” and culminates in a full-voiced proclamation of the world’s reconciliation: “making peace through the blood of his cross.”

Meditating deeply upon Colossians, we are immersed in a world of grace. Nor is this immersion merely a matter of detached, if ardent, speculation. It can change us, transform us, plunging us into baptismal waters of new birth, to emerge as participants in a new way of life, a new manner of human existence.

Paul’s urgency is imperative: we proclaim Christ, he writes, “warning everyone and teaching everyone in all wisdom, that we may present each mature in Christ” (Col 1:28). “Mature” here is telos: fulfilled, brought to perfection. “For in Christ the whole fulness of deity dwells bodily, and you have come to fulness of life in him, who is the head of all rule and authority” (Col 2:9-10).

And what is the heart of this new life, this new manner of existence that Christ alone enables? Paul sums it up. “Just as you received Christ Jesus as Lord, so walk in his way, being rooted and built up in Christ and confirmed in the faith you were taught, overflowing in thanksgiving—en eucharistia.” To live rooted in Christ is to live eucharistically.

Chapter three spells out in some detail what a eucharistic way of life entails and thus provides the template for the Christian spiritual tradition over the ensuing centuries. It contrasts the “old man” who walks in darkness and the “new man” who walks in the light of Christ (see Col 3:9-10). Spiritual writers in the Catholic tradition play multiple variations on this theme, as when Thomas Merton probes the drama of the false self and the true self or Robert Barron explores the conflicts and constraints of the pusilla anima versus the generous and expansive freedom of the magna anima, the mean-spirited versus the large-spirited.

Colossians offers a survey of those acts and practices that contradict a eucharistic life. In effect, Paul exposes and denounces the deadly sins centuries before they were systematically catalogued. Evil desire and covetousness, anger and malice, and mendacity: all rend the Body of Christ; they deny and annul in practice the stupendous reality that “Christ is all, and in all” (Col 3:11).

He goes on to celebrate those actions which confirm and enhance Christians’ new condition as “God’s chosen, holy and beloved” (Col 3:12). Hence, Paul commends kindness, humility, patience, and mutual forgiveness. And he presents a final recapitulation that roots all eucharistically. “Whatever you do, in word or deed, do everything in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks (eucharistountes) to God the Father through him” (Col 3:17). Always speak and act, he says in effect, as though you were celebrating and living the Eucharist.

Fifty years after that intimate encounter with Colossians during my retreat, I was gifted with another “eureka moment.” I chanced to listen to an interview with the Scripture scholar, Scott Hahn, when he mentioned as a matter of fact: “What the first Christians knew as the ‘New Testament’ was not a book, but the Eucharist.”

Well, of course, I thought. Had I not proclaimed precisely this in my sixty years as a priest? Did I not reverently repeat, first in Latin, “Calix Sanguinis Mei, Novi et Aeterni Testamenti,” and afterwards in English, “The Chalice of My Blood, the Blood of the New and Eternal Covenant?” Here in my hands is the new testament, the new covenant: the eucharistic presence of Christ himself.

It became strikingly obvious: the New Testament writings are precious commentary upon Christ’s real presence and sacrifice. They exegete, elucidate, and expatiate upon this foundational reality: the eucharistic presence of the Lord in the midst of the community of disciples who, by the Eucharist, are constituted as, incorporated into, his Body.

Thus, as it was for the first Christians in Corinth, Colossae, or Rome, so it is for present-day Christians in New York, Nairobi, or Rio de Janeiro, the apostolic writings are most properly and effectively read during the celebration of the Eucharist. There, Jesus Christ is remembered and recognized anew in the breaking of the bread. There, our own eucharistic identity is acknowledged and affirmed as we respond, “Amen,” to the minister’s invitation, both alluring and arduous: “the Body of Christ.”

It follows, then, that the experienced reality of the Eucharist should be at the heart of our ongoing theological reflection. For some years now, I have sought to outline dimensions of a eucharistic Christology, considering Christology from its privileged matrix in our celebration of the Eucharist, our transforming encounter with the living Lord in the breaking of the bread and the sharing of the cup.

Doing so may lead us to ponder the Eucharist more as a verb than as a noun, echoing a traditional designation of the Eucharist as gratiarum actio, the action of giving thanks. Celebrating the Eucharist, we are caught up into Jesus Christ’s action, giving thanks to the Father, a thanksgiving which is his self-giving to the Father for our sake, for our salvation. Through Christ, with Christ, in Christ we too are enabled to give thanks by giving ourselves as a living sacrifice in the Spirit.

Christ’s very being is to be Eucharist, to be self-gift for the life of the world (see Jn 6:51). He effects a real “presencing” in the celebration of the Eucharist. And even in the reserved sacrament, the eucharistic Lord is not static or reified. He radiates forth from monstrance or tabernacle, yet is never confined or circumscribed by them. The eucharistic Christ ever comes that we may “have life and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10). Jesus Christ is present as he who comes. As the Lord himself says to the Church at Laodicea: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me” (Rev 3:20). “Amen. Come, Lord Jesus!” (Rev 22:20).

Our being in Christ, our incorporation through the Eucharist into the eucharistic Christ, endows us with a mission. We are called to become witnesses of presence in a time so often marked and marred by absence—absence of meaning, absence of hope. In a society seemingly beset by inattention and distraction, we are called to attend to the wonders too often taken for granted. In a consumerist culture that too often buys and then discards, we are called to practice respect for objects and, even more, reverence for persons. That reverence for persons entails a eucharistic preference for the more needy members of the Body of Christ. As Saint John Chrysostom boldly exclaimed, it makes scarce eucharistic sense to clothe richly the altar of the Lord and leave the members of his Body naked.

The very influential twentieth-century theologian Karl Rahner gave a talk in 1966, just after the conclusion of Vatican II. One sentence from it has been often quoted, though admittedly without considering the full context of his treatment. Rahner prophesied: “the Christian of the future will be a mystic–that is, someone who has experienced something–or will not be.” In 1970’s Catholicism, his words were too often read in an overly subjective way. The accent was placed on “my experience” and the “something” was left ill-defined.

If I may presume, then, to amend the formidable Father Rahner, I would be more precise and say: “the Christian of the future will be a eucharistic mystic—that is, someone who has experienced someone, the eucharistic Christ—or will not be.”

However, by “mystic” I do not mean to imply strange psychological phenomena, levitations, and ecstasies. Rather, following French liturgical theologian Louis Bouyer, I mean by mysticism the mature development of the new life begun in Baptism. The eucharistic mystic is one who can affirm with St. Paul: “I have been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. And the life which I now live in the flesh, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and offered himself for me” (Gal 2:19-20).

Indeed, in our eucharistic encounter with Christ, each of us can exult: “I know and experience in my inmost heart the Son of God who loves me and gives himself for me.” Thus, the mystical life is to grow towards the fullness of that love. It is the fulfillment of the earnest desire the Apostle expresses in another letter closely akin to Colossians. “That Christ may dwell in your hearts through faith; that you, being rooted and grounded in love, may have power to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge. That you may be filled with all the fulness [plērōma] of God” (Eph 3:17-19).

Our eucharistic way of life is summed up by the exchange between priest and assembly at the start of the Eucharistic Prayer. “Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God.” “It is right and just.” But the too familiar words, the peril of their becoming rote (“unreal,” as Newman would say), must not be allowed to dull their challenge. The challenge is pressed further in the priest’s opening words of the Preface: “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks.”

Our duty and our salvation—always and everywhere to give God thanks. What a daunting undertaking: the slow, laborious process of becoming a eucharistic self, “always and everywhere giving thanks,” seeking to be ever attentive to the task at hand, to the person before us, to the further transformation that beckons. What we need now are eucharistic selves, indeed eucharistic mystics. Persons who can deeply resonate to the transfiguring vision Pope Francis set forth as the eucharistic conclusion of his encyclical Laudato Si’. His voice, in harmony with that of Pope Benedict, hymns the overabounding thanksgiving, truly cosmic in scope, that is Catholicism’s eucharistic faith.

It is in the Eucharist that all that has been created finds its greatest exaltation. Grace, which tends to manifest itself tangibly, found unsurpassable expression when God himself became man and gave himself as food for his creatures. The Lord, in the culmination of the mystery of the Incarnation, chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. He comes not from above, but from within, he comes that we might find him in this world of ours. In the Eucharist, fullness is already achieved. The Eucharist is the living center of the universe, the overflowing core of love and of inexhaustible life. Joined to the incarnate Son, present in the Eucharist, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. Indeed, the Eucharist is itself an act of cosmic love.… The Eucharist joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates all creation. The world which came forth from God’s hands returns to him in blessed and undivided adoration: in the bread of the Eucharist, [as Benedict XVI said] “creation is projected towards divinization, towards the holy wedding feast, towards unification with the Creator himself”. (no. 236)

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