This article is part of the series How to Live a Eucharistic Life by Dr. Brad Bursa. Read the earlier parts of the series: Part One, Faith; Part Two, Gift; and Part Three, Offering.
Innocently, the ball rolled across the street and into my neighbor’s ditch. It stopped next to the twelve-inch drainpipe running under his double-wide driveway.
As innocently as the ball, my 4-year-old son trailed after it (under the careful watch of his 13-year-old sister). But, when he reached the ball, he noticed the drainpipe and thought inside his little-boy brain, “I wonder if this here ball will fit inside that there pipe.” So, he gave it a boot.
It did fit. It fit nicely, in fact.
The ball was about a third of the way into the pipe, well out of the reach of the 13-year-old, who left it behind and strode toward the house to tattle.
I heard her out, went to the garage, and fished out the longest thing I could find—a six-foot-long furring strip. I hoisted the narrow board over my shoulder for dramatic effect and set out on my mission. With my head sinking into the wet ditch dirt, I could see the ball deep in the pipe. It glared back at me. It taunted me. I wondered if I could fish it out quickly enough to avoid attracting my neighbor’s attention. I stretched my head into the pipe and patted the ball with the furring strip. I tried to pull it towards me. It rolled over one corrugated ridge and fell into the next groove. Then, it bounded over another, before getting stuck in sediment and rocks inside the pipe.
It was wedged tight.
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As a cramp formed in my neck and shoulder, I pulled my head out of the pipe and realized that three of my kids were standing there watching. Each one, in turn, had to then confirm with their own two eyes that the ball was indeed stuck. My neighbor caught sight of the spectacle and met me at the ditch to find out what was going on in his yard. He announced that he had an idea. He went to his garage and returned with an electric blower. He fired it up on the opposite end of the pipe and tried to blow the ball through towards me, the idiot with his head in the wind tunnel, eyes open wide to see if the ball would move. Dust scraped my eyeballs and debris grated my face.
Coolly, I brushed off the grit and squinted, bleary-eyed, into the pipe again. The ball had not moved. I was losing my patience. By now, three of my other kids were home from school and each came over for a good look and an explanation.
While all of this was going on, my next-door neighbor’s kid (a 19-year-old boy who is about three times my size) pulled into his driveway and jaunted over to see what the crowd in the ditch was all about. He thought there was an animal stuck inside, but when he learned it was a ball, he said, “I think I have the right thing in the garage.” He came back with a telescoping pole with a nub end. “I almost threw this away a few years ago, but I didn’t,” he said. I stood with my mouth agape as he extended it to twelve feet.
He ramrodded the ball through the pipe in no time. As he retracted his gadget, I thanked him several times for his help. “That’s an amazing tool, man, thanks so much. So glad you held onto that.” My neighbor, whose drainpipe was at the bottom of the drama, wasn’t bothered by the scene at all. “Kids are welcome to play in our yard anytime.” (I’m not making this up—as he said this, the soccer ball came flying across the street and landed in his wife’s flowers by their mailbox.) “Um, thanks! That’s so nice of you guys,” I said while one of my kids retrieved the ball.
I walked back across the street with the furring strip on my shoulder. As I approached the garage, our almost-2-year-old greeted me with a sideways smile and a mouth full of cat food. I put the piece of wood down, picked him up, turned back toward the front yard, and had him spit out the food. As he did so, I watched the soccer ball roll across the street and into the ditch again. In an instant, everything felt right about my life—my dependence and life’s fullness. And I was grateful for the whole mess of it.
Ordinary life always provides a glimpse into what’s really real, into the truth of things, but only if we’re attentive. Usually, I’m not. I’m too distracted and rushed. But, the unusualness of the ball in the drainpipe struck me.
My efforts in getting the ball out were fruitless. On my own, by my own devices, the whole thing was an exercise in futility. I needed help. The kid with the telescoping ball pusher-outer provided exactly what was needed at precisely the right moment. And the fact that the ball was in there in the first place, and that my son ate cat food which allowed me to see the ball heading back towards the ditch—all of this was a reminder that my life is full of life. God has provided for me in this way, with a wife, children, a home, and neighbors who care.
This experience reminded me again that I don’t need someone only when I’m patting a ball with a furring strip. I always stand in need. My whole life is one marked by dependence. As a human being, I depend.
The word “depend” literally means to hang from, to be suspended by, to rely upon. To say “I depend,” means I rely completely upon another. To realize our dependence is, as Msgr. Luigi Giussani once put it, a moment of maturation. Dependence means I acknowledge “I do not make myself... I do not give myself being... I am ‘given.’ This is the moment of maturity when I discover myself to be dependent on something else.”1
Joseph Ratzinger said similarly: “Human beings are dependent. They cannot live except from others and by trust.”2
We depend, and radically so. “Radical” comes from the Latin word radix, which means root. Dependence lies at the deepest root of our existence. My feeling of hopelessness in the ditch and my neighbor who came to my aid reminded me of all this.
He also reminded me of God’s providence. Indeed, God’s providence “is concrete and immediate,” the Catechism says. God “cares for all, from the least things to the great events of the world and its history” (CCC, no. 303). He offers us what we need. In this way, we experience God in the moments of fullness—abundance—and this experience of fullness generates gratitude. On this point, Ratzinger says, “Where men have experienced existence in its fullness, its wealth, its beauty, and its greatness, they have always become aware that this existence is an existence for which they owe thanks.”3 For God’s providence, we are grateful.
In every event and need, God’s providence meets human dependence. Therefore, the Catechism notes, “every event and need can become an offering of thanksgiving” (CCC, no. 2638). It is right to give thanks to God for every good and perfect gift, by speaking with him, by praying. As human beings who depend, thanksgiving is simply what we do. For this reason, “thanksgiving characterizes the prayer of the Church which, in celebrating the Eucharist, reveals and becomes more fully what she is” (CCC, no. 2637). The Eucharist is the pinnacle of our thanksgiving.
The Eucharist gathers up every act of human gratitude and offers the whole of it to the Father through Christ’s perfect offering. The Catechism says that “through Christ the Church can offer the sacrifice of praise in thanksgiving for all that God has made good, beautiful, and just in creation and in humanity” (CCC, no. 1359). The Catechism goes on to say, “The Eucharist is a sacrifice of thanksgiving to the Father, a blessing by which the Church expresses her gratitude to God for all his benefits, for all that he has accomplished through creation, redemption, and sanctification” (CCC, no. 1360). Additionally, Pope Benedict XVI reminds us that “in giving thanks to God through the Eucharist, [the faithful] should be conscious that they do so in the name of all creation.”4
In the Eucharist, God provides for our deepest need as human beings, the need to live. The Bread of Life is that supernatural bread that not only satisfies but allows us to live forever by drawing us into communion with the Author of life. And Jesus offers this Bread to us in the Sacrament of Charity, a sacrificial offering that re-presents his act of perfect love on the cross. Dependence and providence. And gratitude. The Eucharist contains all of it. The Eucharist is the source and summit of all the Church’s gratitude. Thus, our Eucharistic dependence, providence, and gratitude flows into the whole of life and back to the Mass again.
The Christian life is the Eucharistic life, for without the Eucharist, we have no life within us (cf. Jn 6:53). Therefore, the Christian life is one of gratitude. The Eucharist, as the Sacrament of thanksgiving, celebrates the depths of human dependence and the heights of God’s providence, the blessing of which cannot be contained within the Mass itself. The Eucharist is like a battering ram that smashes into the illusion of self-sufficiency that prevents us from seeing through to our fundamental dependence and our need for God’s abundant providence. The Eucharist breaks through the crust of daily life, allowing us to peer through life’s fissures and see reality. The Eucharist causes gratitude to well up throughout the whole of our lives, bursting through our often comfortable, superficial existence as an offering to God.
The Eucharist transforms the whole of life into one of gratitude and brings all our individual acts of gratitude to completion. So, we can respond to the priest’s imperative that extends from the Mass to all the moments of every day, drawing them all back to it: “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God,” with an enduring “it is right and just”—even when our boys are playing drainpipe kickball and others sneak cat food.
Brad Bursa is director of evangelization for the Stella Maris Family of Parishes in Cincinnati, Ohio. He is the father of eight children and the author of Because He Has Spoken to Us.
1. Luigi Giussani, The Religious Sense, 105.
2. Joseph Ratzinger, In the Beginning…, 99.
3. Joseph Ratzinger, Introduction to Christianity, 105.
4. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, §92.
