“This Is My Body”

This article appeared in the April 15, 2021 issue of the AD Times, the newspaper of the Diocese of Allentown. Read more about our diocesan goings-on at allentowndiocese.org and ad-today.com.

Bishop Schlert has declared this a diocesan “Year of the Real Presence”: a motive for exceeding gratitude. We note meanwhile the real absence of so many, before and since the onset of the global pandemic. We beg the Lord for the grandest possible reunion this side of eternity, where and while we still happen to be.

Recall how, before Judas handed Jesus over, Jesus pre-emptively handed Himself over, saying “This is My Body” (Mark 14:22). This phrase seems to epitomize the spirt of this special year and just about everything there is to being Catholic.

The immediate and crucial context of the statement was, of course, Eucharistic: the bread and wine of Passover became a New Meal, sealed in the love-offering of the God-Man on the Cross. Jesus never offered a more literal declaration. Grammarians call “is” the copulative verb, because it joins subject and predicate. Bread and wine do not “represent,” “symbolize” or “suggest” His Presence-made-palatable to us: they are He.

Our Lord could utter those words on the night before He died because His mother Mary had lovingly consented to the angel’s invitation to bring Him into the world. In every human respect Our Lady was the first to say, “This is my body,” when she offered herself body and soul to the Holy Spirit’s creative action.

From the streets of Caesarea Philippi to the halls of heaven, Jesus has looked out upon this ragtag bunch and declared, “This is my body”: My Mystical Body, the Church. Since the apostles’ time, fellow disciples and leaders sometimes bewilder, yet what’s more a marvel? The Incarnation still alights upon our altars, pulpits and confessionals, and in every place where prayers, works, joys, and sufferings transform the world and pierce the clouds.

Then there is the furnace of the Christian vocation, considered precisely in the ways spouses, priests and consecrated religious “offer [their] bodies as a spiritual sacrifice”(Romans 12:1). Every well-lived example can say to its counterpart, “This is my body,” when, for example, spouses give themselves without reservation in the one-flesh union of sex, or when a priest attends to the sick and dying.

At the Consecration of the Precious Blood, sometimes I will look up at the chalice, see my reflection and then look down to the faithful. That intimate moment prompts a prophecy cited in the New Testament: “Here I am, and the children God has given me” (Isaiah 8:18; cf. Hebrews 2:13). I cannot be any closer to you, for this is my body – Christ’s Body – distinct from yet united to me.

Sounds romantic, but it must translate into daily life.

It’s easy to become a “bachelor who plays God.” Husbands and wives also can collapse into such a cavalier condition. The sexual realm is not the only possible domain of human degradation, but it’s the one that hurts the most. There’s no comfortable compromise: either a body is “given up for,” or it is not.

Our bodies, given up, convey love with exquisite splendor. Witness Catholic participation in education and healthcare; behold the beauty of our sacred music and architecture. Faithful, lifelong, heroic commitments compel like any well-articulated doctrine.

The Holy Eucharist, the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Apostolic Succession, the interiority of the spousal embrace, and the lived exteriority of beauty, goodness, and truth: this is Real Presence that can unite us as God intends.

Containment Considerations, Part Deux

A faithful interlocutor of mine reached out this morning to ask:

“Two questions.

“One, are you well? I can no longer offer Holy Communion for my priests and am feeling a little worthless.

Two, how am I to stay close to Christ if I cannot be with Him via the Eucharist? I am afraid the connection will be lost or at least weakened.”

The writer didn’t mind waiting for an answer in text or publicly posted, but I described my alacrity below.

You don’t often wait for an answer from me very long. I don’t tend to wait. My mind is a triage center whose supervisor is out back having a smoke during structure fires and vehicle accidents with multiple injuries. I’ve been up for several hours, though I’ve been making good use of the time, the fruits of which I will share at a later date. 

I can take a break from that effort to answer your question. The public posting of such an answer is a good idea, since as you suggest many people are wondering, worrying, downright frustrated about it. Perhaps you read my recent blog post on the subject. I didn’t express my fear of some people’s eventual dereliction of Mass attendance, but it’s present and persistent.

Methods of Natural Family Planning take for granted that couples will not want to or will not be able to achieve fertility at every point in their marriage, even though they are – or marriage and its sexual expressions are, by its very nature – open to it.

We are so to speak in a period of infertility, and certainly not an intentional one. To think that those who habitually or intentionally absent themselves from the sacred assembly for ignoble reasons are also in an infertile period, though theirs happens to their own undoing, perhaps the highest self-abuse or self-neglect.

How do faithful couples achieve intimacy when they are not intending fertile intercourse? They have recourse to many non-genital actions. One priest of my youth preached on romantic/sexual talk as a kind of foreplay to the consummation of the (chiefly-) marital act. It’s a curious but not-for-children appropriate way to consider the Liturgy of the Word.

The weakening of people’s connection has been a concern of mine since the dispensation of the Lord’s Day obligation that preceded the recent ban of public Masses. If so for the first, how much more so for the second!

How are we, then, to stay close? Come to the church if and when it is open (you said yours is not); watch Mass on Internet/television; keep talking to God, voicing every frustration and fear you can think of, whether of your own or others. But don’t let monologue become outright harangue: let supplication be joined by contrition, for whatever deserves it, on your own and others’ behalf; by thanksgiving for what you do have and enjoy, not nearly as it deserves; by adoration of God in Himself and in every tabernacle. 

The Church as such is not neglecting Him by forbidding Mass; we are in some sense, I speculate, experiencing the external ratification of a popular internal disposition. The rain that falls on the just and unjust, the rain that falls on everyone for cleansing.