“Revival: A Lenten Devotional for Eucharistic Renewal,” is a series of simple, daily reflections that will help Catholics rekindle a living relationship with Jesus by reflecting on their relationship with the Lord, the Eucharist, and our missionary call to share the love of God with our neighbors.
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; Part Three, Offering; and Part Four, Gratitude.
When we think of communion, we think of Holy Communion at Mass. But communion also has something to do with our whole life. A Eucharistic life is a life of communion. What does this mean? Pope Benedict XVI gives us a helpful blueprint:
Communion always and inseparably has both a vertical and a horizontal sense: it is communion with God and communion with our brothers and sisters. Both dimensions mysteriously converge in the gift of the Eucharist. “Wherever communion with God, which is communion with the Father, with the Son and with the Holy Spirit, is destroyed, the root and source of our communion with one another is destroyed. And wherever we do not live communion among ourselves, communion with the Triune God is not alive and true either.”1
These two dimensions—vertical and horizontal—can shape a whole way of life according to God’s design, which is to say, according to communion.
When I think of vertical communion, I immediately think of the time I was invited to lead a retreat day for all the school principals in my archdiocese. As I was driving to the retreat, waves of insecurity, self-doubt, and fear filled my heart. Negative self-talk flooded my mind. It was intense. I began to feel sick. “I’ve gotta get out of this,” I thought to myself. When my thoughts carried me to the point of thinking about driving my car into a ditch, I remembered to pray. I muttered something about needing God’s help. The help came in the form of a sudden realization: If I am God’s adopted son through Baptism, and if this communion is nourished by the Eucharist, then my identity is not contingent upon my success or failure in addressing these principals. No, my worth is not determined by this retreat at all, but by God and my relationship with him. Believing in these facts, I could engage in the retreat without fear—abiding in the humble confidence that is proper for a son. I remember walking into the retreat with a deeper peace than I’d ever experienced before. It was the peace of abiding communion, and it is the peace given to all those who are drawn into communion with God. See, when we are in communion with God—vertical communion—we are never alone.
Vertical communion means at every moment of our life God is with us. In the face of the constant threat of isolation and division caused by sin and a culture of death, the Eucharist holds us in communion with God, who is communion itself. In God, there is no isolation or division or loneliness. There is only love, relationship, and abiding communion. When we receive the Eucharist, we not only encounter Emmanuel, God with us, but we go a step further. The Eucharist is not only God with us, the Eucharist is God intimately in us through Holy Communion. Alive in us, he animates our lives and draws us into deeper communion with the Trinity.
Horizontal communion drives at an amazing point: that somehow, in God’s providence, we are all wrapped up in each other’s salvation. We are invited to participate in the joint mission of the Son and the Spirit (cf. CCC, no. 690). Dom Jean-Baptiste Chautard opens his classic The Soul of the Apostolate with an expression of wonder at this fact, when he says, “How admirable the plan, the universal law laid down by Providence, that it is through men, that men are to find out the way to salvation.”2 If we pause for just a moment to consider where our lives would be without the Church, we would likely shudder at the thought.
Recently, the profundity of horizontal communion struck me during a funeral liturgy for a stillborn baby. As we joined in praying for the child and for the grieving parents, Bishop Earl Fernandes of the Diocese of Columbus concluded his homily by noting just how difficult it can be to pray when we are overcome by suffering or numbed by intense pain. So, he invited the grieving parents to simply be a buoy in a sea of the prayers of the Church. All those gathered that day, plus so many more, were propping up this little family with prayer amid the turbulent winds of loss and the driving rain of those relentless questions that pound the heart and batter the mind. This was horizontal communion at its finest—a rising tide of prayers inspired by the Spirit, lifting our brother, sister, and their baby boy to the Father through Jesus’ sacrifice on the altar. To be Catholic, to be in communion, is to never be alone and to never leave someone alone. It is vertical and horizontal, divine and human. It is the foundation of solidarity.
Over the last 20 years, two definitive pillars have emerged in my life as key supports for abiding in communion with God, that is, vertical communion. The first is frequent reception of the Eucharist: I try to get to daily Mass as often as possible during the week. The second pillar is a daily appointment with God (i.e., daily prayer time), a time solely devoted to prayer. No multitasking or checking things off the list. Within my daily appointment, I read through the daily Mass readings and pray lectio divina with the Gospel passage. These two spiritual practices—frequent reception of the Eucharist and the prayer appointment—draw me into deeper communion with God on a daily basis.
From this vertical communion with God, I enter into horizontal communion. God created human beings in his image and likeness (Gn 1:26–27). To be human, that is, to really live as a human being, is to re-present God who is a communion of persons. Communion is who God is and, as beings made in God’s image and likeness, it’s who we are called to be. This is why Pope St. John Paul II, in his catechesis on the human person, says, “Man becomes the image of God not so much in the moment of solitude as in the moment of communion.”3 We are called to mediate God’s love to one another in a life of communion that images the life of the Trinity.
The horizontal dimension of communion is a multifaceted reality, involving communion within one’s family, friendships, and, of course, the Church. The family is the fundamental cell of society. “The family, which is founded and given life by love, is a community of persons: of husband and wife, of parents and children, of relatives,” John Paul II says. “Its first task is to live with fidelity the reality of communion in a constant effort to develop an authentic community of persons.”4 The family provides the first and fundamental “place” in which we experience horizontal communion, and it is the first place in which we can, and should, lean into communion.
The Eucharistic life of communion has a cruciform shape. The two arms of the Cross—vertical and horizontal—testify to the communion of love of God and neighbor. The primacy of this love reaches from the depths of our humanity to the heights of divinity. At the same time, this love embraces, with Christ, the broad expanse of the human family and draws it up through the Holy Spirit to the Father. The Eucharist makes this all-encompassing, cruciform, and communal love possible because, as Pope Benedict XVI says, “in the Eucharist he gives us this two-fold love” for God and neighbor. And, “nourished by this Bread, we love one another as he has loved us.”5
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. Benedict XVI, Sacramentum Caritatis, no. 76.
2. Chautard, Soul of the Apostolate, 5–6.
3. John Paul II, General Audience, November 14, 1979.
4. John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio,no. 18.
5. Benedict XVI, “Angelus: November 4, 2012” (Citta del Vaticano: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2012).
