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The National Eucharistic Revival identifies Eucharistic Life as the third pillar of the Year of Mission. Flowing from the Eucharistic encounter and renewed in identity as sons and daughters of God, “our lives are configured to his,” the Playbook says. Eucharistic life is about conforming our lives to the living, Eucharistic God. But what does this mean? What does Eucharistic living look like? How do we configure our lives to the Eucharist? In what ways does the Eucharist challenge our way of thinking and living? How does the Eucharist—and the fact that God, in his wisdom, chooses to encounter us Eucharistically—shape Christian life? What does the Eucharist teach us about how we are to live and who we are to become?
Over the course of this series, I will reflect on various aspects of Eucharistic life. Consequently, I will not be speaking in abstractions. The Eucharist is real, objective, and concrete. The Eucharist prevents us from getting lost in theories. Recently, a reflection in Magnificat put it this way: “Unless we are given a way for Jesus Christ to be inside us, we will turn Christ into an abstraction.”1 “Matter matters,” as Bishop Barron is fond of saying. If we turn Christ into an abstraction or a figment of our own imagination, we will turn Christian living into an abstraction. When this happens, we start justifying actions and engaging in a moral sleight of hand. The Eucharist keeps our lives grounded. The Eucharist grounds the Christian life in reality—the way things are.
This series will not present an exhaustive list of elements of Eucharistic life. It will not be the final word; rather, I hope it opens space for reflection. I hope to encourage further meditation on the Eucharist and the Eucharist’s impact on daily life. Undoubtedly, a mystery so great as the Eucharist invites innumerable discoveries and practical applications for living the Christian life.
In this introductory article, I would like to briefly reflect on the Eucharist and faith, because Eucharistic life is one marked by faith.
Think about it. The Eucharist appears to be ordinary bread. The Eucharist appears to be ordinary wine. The Eucharist tastes and smells like those objects, too. Furthermore, the Eucharist doesn’t usually seem to have any dramatic, immediate effect on my life. Mass is not like Mario powering-up on mushrooms. Yet we are invited to believe the Eucharist is Jesus. We are invited to believe Jesus is really and truly present. We are invited to believe the Eucharist transforms us. To the nth degree, the Eucharist provokes faith in God. In a sense, faith is the only thing we can stand on in the presence of this Mystery. Yet this Eucharistic faith is not some blind faith or a flight into the irrational. Eucharistic faith is entirely reasonable.
The act of faith is belief in something or someone unseen. Belief regards something as true and real on the testimony of another (cf. CCC §177). It is an indirect way of knowing because it is mediated. We exercise a kind of “everyday” or “natural” faith all the time. If I had to see everything with my own two eyes before acting, I would be stuck. My intellect does not “see” the object directly, like working out a math problem on my own, making a scientific observation, or analyzing data I collected. Faith has to do with knowledge through a witness. I believe “something” because I believe “someone.” Josef Pieper, a 20th century German philosopher, boils this down into a line, a little formula showing a twofold movement of belief: Belief in and belief that—I place my belief (complete trust) in someone that what he has seen and told me is true. By trusting in another (who is trustworthy!), I can see and know more than I could if I relied solely upon my own devices.
If I had to understand everything on my own, I would have to start over at square one every day. Instead, I constantly live by faith. I think about the faith I am placing in the maker of the chair I am sitting on right now (and the chair itself), that it isn’t going to fall apart underneath me. I think about the number of people who constructed the car I drove to the park, not to mention all the people I passed on the road while getting here. I put faith in the restaurant workers, that they cooked the food completely and aren’t trying to poison me. And, most importantly, I believe that the barista at the coffee shop gave me regular coffee and not decaf while she was doing her thing on the other side of the drive through window! We exercise “everyday faith” all the time. It is entirely reasonable, and without it, without a basic trust in humanity, life would be impossible.
Faith in God—the theological virtue of Faith—is greater and surer than any faith placed in human beings. We are talking here about “supernatural” faith as opposed to the “natural” or “everyday” variety. Returning to Pieper’s formula: “supernatural” faith means I have faith in God, that what God has revealed is true. To say “yes” to all God has revealed requires a prior gift from God; hence faith is a gift freely given by God through the Church, inviting our free acceptance of it (cf. CCC §179–180). Faith is “the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that he has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because he is truth itself” (CCC §1814). Faith in God allows us to see more. It allows us to live with a kind of security amid the most intense and most gripping situations in life—including the universally inescapable one, death. The Catechism of the Catholic Church expresses all of this beautifully, when it says:
Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed. As personal adherence to God and assent to his truth, Christian faith differs from our faith in any human person. It is right and just to entrust oneself wholly to God and to believe absolutely what he says. (§150)
To get at the reasonableness of Eucharistic faith—and, consequently, Eucharistic life—let’s briefly trace some Eucharistic “logic.”
We believe God created something out of nothing—namely the whole universe.
“In the beginning was the Word,
and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God.
He was in the beginning with God.
All things came to be through him,
and without him nothing came to be” (Jn 1:1–3).
The prologue of John’s Gospel is a commentary on the Old Testament creation narratives. The commentary runs thus: what God says happens. His word has power.
This God creates everything that exists and eventually crowns his creative action with human beings. Unfortunately, our first parents sinned, and discord disrupted the harmony of the created order. Throughout the Old Testament, we hear the story of God’s people and God’s relentless pursuit of them—his consistent attempts to save them. These efforts culminate in the fullness of time, when the Word, the Son of God, the second person of the Holy Trinity, takes flesh in the womb of a virgin named Mary.
Jesus is God and throughout the Gospels, when he speaks (through both words and actions), things happen. Reality conforms to his command.
This conformity reaches its heights in the Eucharist.
“Then he took the bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.’ And likewise the cup after they had eaten, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which will be shed for you’” (Lk 22:19–20).
“For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever" (Jn 6:55–58).
If the God who creates everything out of nothing takes on human flesh in the person of Jesus, then why can’t Jesus make something new out of something he ultimately made? Why can’t he give a new and different meaning to something that he originally gave meaning to? Who says he can’t? “Where were you when I founded the earth?” the Lord asks Job. “Tell me, if you have understanding” (Job 38:4). The plain truth throughout all of Scripture is this: if God speaks, then it is so. If God’s words can create reality, then God’s words can change reality.
If we believe Jesus is who he says he is (i.e., God), then why would we not believe what he says about the Eucharist? Who are we to say God couldn’t decide to be really, truly present—body and blood, soul and divinity—in what appears to be ordinary bread and wine? Why couldn’t it be his flesh and blood? Yes, the teaching on the Eucharist is a hard saying, shocking even, but Jesus does not call back those who left him to say he was just testing them or speaking symbolically. Instead, he turns to the Twelve and asks if they are going to leave as well.
The Eucharist is a Sacrament of faith, inviting us to build our lives on God and his word. Said more formulaically: the Eucharist, being an opportunity for us to exercise faith, invites us to believe in God, that what he says about the Eucharist is true. When it comes to living the Eucharistic life, in a real sense, we are riding on the coattails of Peter’s faith, when he said: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68).
Jesus, you are the Word of God, you are the Bread of Life.
1. Magnificat, August 18, 274
