What Jesus taught me about the Eucharist

After the September 17 parish council meeting, I stayed around for a few minutes talking with people. At one point a young man and I started talking about a number of topics. He expressed his concern about the catechists in his area.

At one point, he began to reflect on the Eucharist.

He noted that many people do recognize the presence of Christ in the Eucharist they receive. But he added that, when we receive the Body of Christ in communion, we also are connected with the people of God. We are also receiving the mancomunidad of the Eucharist, calling us into Communion with the Body of Christ present in our world, and not only in the Eucharist. 

He used the word “mancomunidad” which is used for associations of municipalities that work together for the good of the communities involved. He grasped something that so many forget but which is central to the Catholic understanding of Eucharist, especially among the Fathers of the Church, such as St. John Chrysostom. In a sermon on the Gospel of Matthew he said:

Do you want to honor Christ’s body? Then do not scorn him in his nakedness, nor honor him here in the church with silken garments while neglecting him outside where he is cold and naked. For he who said: This is my body, and made it so by his words, also said: You saw me hungry and did not feed me, and inasmuch as you did not do it for one of these, the least of my brothers, you did not do it for me.

I was overwhelmed by the depth of this man’s reflections. He is a campesino, who works the land, who lived with his wife and kids. His formal education is minimal, but he has grasped the mysteries of God and he has opened my heart.

The Eucharist is communion with Jesus and it is also communion with others. These both aspects are intimately related. If we forget one of them, we have missed an essential part of the mystery of God. 

This young man taught me and inspired me. 

 His name is Jesús.

A good Good Friday

A few weeks ago I had arranged to go to Debajiados for Good Friday. It’s one of the most remote villages and, if it has been raining, you can’t get in by car, even in four-wheel drive!

This morning about 7:15 I called Juan Ángel and asked him about the road and when they were going to begin the Stations. The road was fine and they had planned to start at 8:00. I had planned fro 9 or later. I almost panicked but he offered to put starting off until I arrived.

I arrived in 45 minutes – since the road was good and there was no traffic.

Entering the village I found Juan Ángel, his kids, and a woman preparing the stations. Later I found out that someone had broken up a few of the stations they had arranged earlier. (Someone said it was some local evangelicals.)

The stations started at about nine – with a nice crowd, including a surprising number of men and a lot of kids.

When we reached the church at the end of the stations at about 11, they decided to go straight into the celebration of the Passion.

The celebration was straight-forward, though I was moved by the veneration of the cross.

One thing I noted is how hard it is for most of the people in these aldeas [villages] to read. But then  I remember that many of these people have had little formal education. One rather articulate single twenty-three year old who read pretty well has only had two years of formal education. With so little, some do so much.

After a simple lunch I went with Juan angel to bring Communion to his parents who have been ill for several months and haven’t been able to get to church. No wonder. They live about 30 minutes from Debajiados by horse – up and down hills.

So the poor horse, named Payaso – the clown, carried Communion and me to the sick. 

I recognized Antonio, his father, who had been very active in the church in Debajiados. We talked, I shared prayer and Communion and then I left with Juan Ángel’s grandmother and some other relatives who were visiting. On the way out we found out that someone drowned in a nearby water hole. I ended up giving a number of folks a ride so that they could go to the village where the accident happened.

What is the meaning of this for me?

Today as I prepared for the Celebration of the Word I was struck by two passages which spoke to me of how God didn’t just suffer for us; in Jesus, God suffers with us.

In the letter to the Hebrews (3:16), the author characterizes Jesus as a high priest but 

“we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who has similarly been tested in every way, yet without sin.”

Isaiah 53:4 speaks of the suffering servant in these words:

it was our pain that he bore, our sufferings he endured.

We do not have a God who is far from our sufferings, who does not share in them. We have a God who is with us in our suffering; that does not take away the pain but it may give us strength to struggle and hope.

Maybe this image I captured of a small cross on the road, amid the people's feet, sums it up well. Christ is here, looking at life from the ground up, seeing the worn and tired feet, but present - and vulnerable.

 In this way we are called to be a church that resembles Jesus, as Jon Sobrino writes:

To resemble Jesus is to reproduce the structure of his life. In gospel terms, the structure of Jesus’ life is a structure of incarnation, of becoming real flesh in real history. And Jesus’ life is structured in function of the fulfillment of a mission— the mission of proclaiming the good news of the Reign of God, inaugurating that Reign through all signs of every sort, and denouncing the fearsome reality of the anti-Reign. The structure of Jesus’ life meant taking on the sin of the world, and not just standing idly by looking at it from the outside. It meant taking on a sin that, today, surely, continues to manifest its greatest power in the fact that it puts millions of human beings to death. Finally, the structure of Jesus’ life meant rising again and raising again— having, and bestowing on others, life, hope, and gladness.

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The quote from Sobrino is found in his essay “The Samaritan Church and the Principle of Mercy,”
found in Christine M. Bochen, ed., The Way of Mercy. Orbis Books, pp. 60-61.

Building Communion

Today Little Brother Arturo Paoli passed on to the Lord he loved so much – at the age of 102.  Arturo Paoli was a member of the Little Brothers of the Gospel, a community founded with the spirituality of Blessed Charles de Foucauld.

Cross of Charles de Foucauld

The Little Brothers – as well as the Little Sisters – live a life of poverty among the poor, working as the poor do, living in community among the poor, with a deep devotion to Jesus, incarnate, present in the Eucharist, and present among the poor.

Little Brother Arturo brought the Little Brothers to Latin America in 1959 and spent much of his life in our continent. He lived in Argentina where the Little Brothers suffered under the dictatorships, several of them martyred for their solidarity with the poor.

In Venezuela he lived in community of Bojó, in the western part of the country. For a  time he shared his home with Pedro, an un-churched twenty-year old. In response to this he wrote a book for Carlos – and for all of us, Gather Together in My Name. Published by Orbis Books in 1987, it is regrettably out of print.

I had decided to spend today as a day of prayer and personal retreat but I had no idea what I would read.

Opening Facebook I discovered that Little Brother Arturo had died. I quickly sought out this book which I had read many years ago and which I had brought with me to Honduras.

I went through the book, looking at my notations and found myself challenged, but filled with joy. I found some responses to questions on how I am to live here.

Who am I – as a Christian?

Christians are persons who discover that they are loved, and find that the best response they can give, the only way to say “thanks” for the love they receive is the response of loving. The very need to love leads them not to refuse any proposal, any path that seems to them to be a good one for building communion….
if you really love, if you been captured by the love of Christ, you throw yourself into the battle for communion, but you’re on the lookout jot to lose the essential thing: love for human beings. (pp 137-8)

It all starts with God’s love –not with any ideology, not even with any doctrinal content. It all starts with the fact, with the experience of God’s love which urges us on (2 Corinthians 5:14).

What does Christ want us to share?

Today I’d say that the important thing is to share in Christ’s ideal, which can be summed up in one phrase: “to build communion by taking cognizance of uncommunion.” This is crucial, and I want to stress it with you: Christ’s ideal is to  make communion where there is uncommunion. (pp. 81-82)
 All around me I see uncommunion: poor families suffering for lack of land and work’ farmers worrying about the lack of rain and what that might mean for their families; victims of violence who feel alone and without any source of help, especially from the government and police; people in the streets frustrated by the lack of accountability of government officials in the light of serious monetary scandals; people in church separated because of those leaders at many levels who don’t want to share or allow others to participate; and so much more.

How can I be present so that communion may become possible?

What am I called to?

… all whom Jesus calls are called to one thing alone: to discover a relationship with our Father by building a communion of brothers and sisters, to bring it about in some way or another that human relationships change….
 Our betrayal of the Gospel is such that we have failed sufficiently to reflect that Christ’s interest is not so much that of getting the hungry something to eat as it is of taking a diabolical relationship and making a love relationship of it. (p. 183)

And what to do?

First of all, one ought to form a clear notion that life has not been bestowed on us in order to make money to be well off. Our raison d’être, as the French say, our reason for being, is to become brothers and sisters…
 The second thing is not to refuse political tasks that bear directly on eliminating justice in the world, and helping human beings to become brothers and sisters…. what counts is live. What counts is the real desire to struggle for communion. The third thing to do is to “be compassionate” (Luke 6:36(. Well, it’s not actually something to “do,” because we don’t get to be compassionate just by making up our minds to be so. Being compassionate is a result of something…. The  “compassionate heart” — particular sensitivity toward sisters and brothers who have been left behind, been left out — is the gift of Christ to his friends, and is the most characteristic sign that someone is Christ’s friend. (pp. 26-28)

Where do I go from here?

The first step I see is to keep reminding myself of God’s love and opening myself to my brothers and sisters her.

What follows?

Only God knows.