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The Real Presence

To my mind, this rather confusing passage leaves no doubt that Jesus really meant what he said at the Last Supper with the words "This is my Body....This is a cup of my blood." He doesn't leave any room for loopholes or any talk of mere metaphors. In this passage he says it too many times: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood"..."Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood"...And then he repeats it. The people who heard him didn't take it as a mere symbol, as many Christian denominations do. They understood exactly what he meant and therefore rejected him as a madman.

Henry VIII held out for the Real Presence. Martin Luther said, "I'd rather drink blood with the Romans than wine with the Zwinglians." Mary McCarthy, the highly sophisticated journalist, a fallen-away Catholic, once paid a courtesy visit to the novelist Flannery O'Connor. Somehow, the conversation touched on the Eucharist, and McCarthy averred that she found it a very evocative symbol (The Holy Grail, and all that.) With her admirable terseness, Flannery said, "If it's only asymbol, I say t'hell with it."

Transsubstantiation boggles the mind. Then again so does the incarnation. So in fact does the force of gravity. And unmerited suffering. And love.

The hymn Panis Angelicus puts it forthrightly: Dat panis caelicus figuris terminum-"This heavenly bread puts an end to all roundabout metaphors and all attempts to flesh-out our understanding of what takes place on the Mass table"-like pondering the Eucharist's resonances to the Mosaic manna in the desert or the miracle of the loaves and fishes, which no more "explain" the Eucharist than a shamrock "explains" the Trinity.

The cliche warns us that, however partially helpful, "all analogies limp." You can get valuable insights into a reality you know less well by seeing true similarities to a reality you know better. You've never met Alfie? Well, Alfie is a pig. Overweight, slobbering, uncouth, etc., but the analogy goes only so far. Alfie doesn't have a curly tail or a stove-plate snout. The Kingdom of Heaven is like a banquet. Jubilant fun without excess, all antagonisms set aside, etc., but nobody has to be a busboy or a kitchen slavey, stuck with the leftovers.

But in stark contrast the Panis Angelicus says: In declaring the meaning of the Eucharist, Jesus put an end to all figuris, all analogies, all approximations. O res mirabilis manducat Dominum pauper servus et humilis: "What an unspeakable truth! The poor lowly servant eats the Lord!" This not like My Body. This is my Body. Take it or leave it.

That by no means suggests divine displeasure at those who find the Real Presence indigestible in the light of other truths they believe tolerate no compromise, like the laws of physics, like the truism that two distinct realities can't occupy the same space. You can be a good-even exemplary, even saintly-person and deny the Real Presence, as Socrates, Gandhi and Albert Camus unarguably were. You're just not a Catholic Christian. Nothing shameful in that.

All right. I accept Jesus. I accept his unique, privileged possession of the Truth. But how? How can the Architect of the Universe smallen himself into a wafer of bread and a splash of wine? I don't know, any more than I can comprehend how he could smallen himself into Our Lady's womb. But if I accept that he could bring the whole ordered carouse of the universe out of nothingness, I'm trapped into accepting that he can do anything he damn well pleases.

Sometimes I wince at yielding to that. But bowing to it is so enriching it's hard to believe it's false. Think of it! The immortal God, come to bring dawn into the darkness of our bellies and our souls! Wow!

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