EUCHARIST AS TOUCHSTONE

I believe that the primary healing of human loneliness and meaninglessness is full contact with full reality itself, especially in its concrete forms (instead of just ideas and concepts). But, as T. S. Elliot said in the Four Quartets, “[Human]kind cannot bear very much reality.” What human existence often prefers is highly contrived ways of avoiding the real, the concrete, the physical. We fabricate artificial realities instead, one of which, I'm sad to say, is religion itself. So Jesus brought all of our fancy thinking down to earth, to one concrete place of incarnation—this bread and this cup of wine! “Eat it here, and then see it everywhere,” He seems to be saying.

 If it's too idealized and pretty, if it's somewhere floating around up in the air, it's probably not the Gospel. We come back, again and again, to this marvelous touchstone of orthodoxy, the Eucharist. Eucharist, in the first physical incarnation in the body of Jesus, is now continued in space and time in ordinary food. Note how John (6:53-66) almost embarrassingly keeps insisting on the fleshly physicality of it all! And “many left Him and stopped going with Him” (John 6:66). It is still an embarrassment of sorts, so we high churches surround the scandal with all kinds of pretty gold and lace and candles.