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Sunday, April 27, 2008
Fran’s Sunday Ruminations: The Smallest Drop Of Wine
Overheard at a dinner table, location unspecified:
"Mommy? Is God really within each of us?"
"Of course He is, sweetheart!"
"Well, I hope He likes Brussels sprouts."
Out of the mouths of babes...
Recently I've been musing over certain aspects of Catholic doctrine, most particularly the Miracle of Transubstantiation, the one and only "mass-produced" miracle sanctioned by the Church. It's core Catholic dogma that the host becomes the flesh of Christ, and the wine His blood, and that we who partake of the Eucharist are quite literally doing as He commanded us to do:
Then the Jews who were hostile to Jesus began complaining about him because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Isn’t this Jesus the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus replied, “Do not complain about me to one another. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him, and I will raise him up at the last day. It is written in the prophets, ‘And they shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who hears and learns from the Father comes to me. (Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God—he has seen the Father.) I tell you the solemn truth, the one who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This is the bread that has come down from heaven, so that a person may eat from it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats from this bread he will live forever. The bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”Then the Jews who were hostile to Jesus began to argue with one another, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “I tell you the solemn truth, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in yourselves. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood resides in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who consumes me will live because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven; it is not like the bread your ancestors ate, but then later died. The one who eats this bread will live forever.” [John 6:41-58]
The Transubstantiation is not a matter of form. The form of the wafer and wine remain as they were; only their substance changes. Form, here, subsumes all the temporal properties of those items. Putting a Transubstantiated host or a cup of Transubstantiated wine into a mass spectrometer would tell us nothing about the presence of Christ within it. The change is on a par with the Last Supper, where -- according to the Gospel accounts, at least -- the bread and wine He gave to His disciples appeared to their senses to remain unchanged.
That's a pretty subtle miracle, a lot less showy than raising the dead or healing the crippled and blind. But it's the sort of miracle that's appropriate to ordained mortals and the sustenance of faith. For Christ did not intend that anyone should be brought into His flock, or kept there, by a conjurer's arts. The visible miracles He performed during His time of ministry were seed corn for the faith of the ages to come.
The central point is this: Christ demanded no sacrifices of others. Except for the first Eucharist, every one of Christ's miracles, from the wine of Cana to the resurrection of Lazarus, was a celebration and veneration of life. His only sacrifice was of Himself.
The Eucharist was not a sacrifice, except in the symbolic sense. Our commemorative recreation of the Eucharist, though we call the bread and wine a "sacrifice," is nothing of the sort. It certainly isn't an offering of flesh, the only sort of sacrifice first-century Jews would have sanctioned. Rather, it's the invocation of Divine authority by an ordained priest, to allow us to experience the most intimate imaginable union with Our Savior, just as His Apostles did. We get back infinitely more than we give.
A Communion host is a small item. You don't go home from Mass feeling physically full. Nor will the sacramental wine get you tipsy. Indeed, at those Masses where the Blood of Christ is shared with the congregation, it's customary merely to allow the Transubstantiated wine to wet one's lips. For it's not the quantity that matters; the merest crumb of host, the smallest drop of wine, are sufficient to recreate the miracle of the Eucharist, wherein the Redeemer commemorates His sacrifice of Himself for our sakes.
Isn't that how it should be? The Son of God, who deigned to suffer the limitations of the flesh for our sakes, is infinitely far above us in the grand Scheme of things. He, together with His Father, holds the world in His hand. There are billions of us; there is one of Him. Yet His sacrifice suffices to save us all.
"Sin is cruelty and injustice; all else is peccadillo." -- Robert A. Heinlein, Glory Road
On Saturday, April 19, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated a special Mass for American clergy at Saint Patrick's Cathedral in New York. During his homily, he told the three thousand attendees, priests, nuns, and bishops all, "I am a sinner, as you are. I thank you for loving me and praying for me."
In all probability, no better man than Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Pope Benedict XVI, walks the Earth at this time. An intellectual titan who has served God for more than sixty years and has risen to the highest office of our Church, he is nevertheless a humble and grateful man. If he is willing to nominate himself as a sinner, the rest of us have little reason to think ourselves any better.
I struggled with the notion of innate human sinfulness for a long time. As Anthony Boucher once wrote, it's difficult to imagine why God in His perfection would have created anything less than Himself. Yet it is so. But it's worth a bit of reflection on why it's so.
Human individuality in thought and deed is our defining characteristic. As Ayn Rand put it, we are creatures of volitional consciousness. But to be individual is to be perpetually in competition with others in innumerable ways. Thus, we are under continuous temptation to treat those around us as means to our own ends.
Alongside that, we are capable creatures: "project pursuers," in Loren Lomasky's phrase. We conceive of goals, undertake to reach them, and quite frequently succeed. Being individuals, isolated from one another within our skulls and only dimly able to conceive of God, success has an unfortunate tendency to go to our heads. Instead of being grateful for the gift of life and thought, we exalt ourselves over our trivial accomplishments. We imagine ourselves to be more significant than we really are, forgetting that not one atom of our substance is truly of our own making. We disdain to give thanks.
Sin is a simple matter, really. It's either the willful denial and denigration of God and our debt of gratitude to Him, or it's the abuse of others. All else is about context, form, and detail. But it is written into our natures as individually conscious entities, capable of responding only to our own desires, fears, and beliefs, that we should be continuously susceptible to temptation -- and that all of us, now and then, will succumb.
But Christ has renewed us all. From the beginning of our species to the last breath of the last of us who'll ever live, His sacrifice of Himself powers the salvation of Man. The promise of Redemption inheres in the smallest drop of wine.
May God bless and keep you all.
Comments
I’m not a Catholic, and I don’t believe in papal infallibility, but I sure wish that more of our leaders would show the kind of humility and service to the “flock” that the Pope shows.
Posted by on 05/02/2008 at 07:21 PM
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