Schola Christi: Encounter and Feast

Schola Christi, The Oratory Lecture Series and Homilies from The Pittsburgh Oratory

Guardini examines with us language used in regards to the Eucharist and how it effects our understanding of what and, specifically here in this reflection, Who we receive. After having discussed the Bread of Life discourse with us and its sharp language emphasizing the reality of the gift that Christ makes of Himself to us, Guardini doesn't want us to reduce the Eucharist to an object and lose sight of the Person. "A person is not passed about; he comes, enters into a vital you-me relationship, gives himself freely and personally. This is the second concept inherent in the Mass. The first was the meal; the second is the encounter." Christ dwells us among us and in the Eucharist He is "He who comes to me." A memorial can commemorate only a person. 'Commemoration always implies a person, and it presupposes a vital relationship to that person. Genuine commemoration is a projection of an already existing 'we-relationship.'” In other words, Christ comes to us in all his personal reality - everything He has and is and His salutary destiny. This naturally changes our understanding of the word "Feast" as well. Guardini writes: "He comes in the plenitude of His whole redemptory life- each time in the particular mystery of the day that the unrolling liturgical year is commemorating: the mystery of God’s Incarnation, or His Epiphany, or His Passion, or His Resurrection and Ascension. He comes to us from the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit. To wait for Him, to invite Him, to go to receive and honor and praise Him, to be with Him, drawn into the intimacy of Communion with Him-that is the Christian feast." God has engaged us in the ultimate form of intimacy that surpasses any worldly union.

THE PARTICIPANT in Holy Mass enters into a community at table. Early in the Mass he receives God’s word, which he accompanies with his prayers, glorifying God and placing his personal concerns at the feet of the provident Father. Then, beholding and participating, he helps to prepare the sacred meal, to which he brings his offering. And however impersonal the money-piece, it is the accepted substitute for the more vital form of giving. Now with the priest he turns to the Father and receives through faith the presence of Him who said: “I am the living bread that has come down from heaven” (John 6:52). At Communion he sees in spirit the Father’s hand proffering the sacred nourishment, which he reverently accepts, that he may “have life.” But this conception of the Lord’s Supper or Feast does not stand alone. It is coupled with another: that of Christ’s “coming.”

Spiritual language has its own idiom for this second aspect, which it expresses with great simplicity. Everywhere we meet sentences such as these: Christ is present in the Mass; in Communion the Lord gives Himself to the communicant; He lingers with him. Those who insist that spiritual language is sometimes faulty, and who should on this point be soberly corrected, should re-read the text of Christ’s speech at Capharnaum. Referring to the promised Eucharist, the Lord Himself uses the image of a coming, an encounter. Along with His insistence on the real eating and drinking of the real food, we find such sentences as: “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” “. . . not that anyone has seen the Father except him who is from God, he has seen the Father.” “I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. If anyone eat of this bread he shall live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” “As the living Father has sent me, and as I live because of the Father, so he who eats me, he also shall live because of me.” (See John 6:33-57).

The “meat indeed” and “drink indeed” offered by the hand of the Father is not a thing but a Person; not “it” but He, the supreme Person praised in all eternity. Hence the reverent believer is naturally inclined to feel that the words about eating and drinking somehow debase the sacred Person of Christ. St. John is the Evangelist who had to wage an endless battle against the heresies which began to crop up even in his lifetime. That is why his wording of the truth in all fundamental passages is extremely sharp. In his Prologue he does not state that God’s Son became man, he uses the more forceful expression: “the Word was made flesh.” In reference to the Eucharist he does not use the statement employed by the Synoptics: “take and eat, this is my body,” but: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has life everlasting…. For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood, abides in me and I in him” (John 6:54-56). Here is the ultimate clarification to which a man must speak his clear, decisive “Yes!” or “No!”

It is at this point that the difficulty we mentioned becomes apparent, a genuine difficulty quite different from the stubborn contrariness of “the Jews,” of the “many disciples,” or of Judas at Capharnaum; here we have the valid fear that the Lord’s self-offering could be dragged from the purity of His relation to us as a Person to the level of a mere thing or object. A person, and least of all He, the Holy One and Lord, cannot simply be given and taken and had; a person is not something to be passed about here and there. A person is not passed about; he comes, enters into a vital you-me relationship, gives himself freely and personally. This is the second concept inherent in the Mass. The first was the meal; the second is the encounter. Both are expressed time and again by Christ Himself as well as by the general spiritual phrases His words have inspired. The one image is sustained by words like “the true bread,” the “food and drink,” the “flesh for the life of the world”; the other by “come down from heaven,” “He who comes to me,” and by the countless expressions of the Lord’s being among us, with us, His inclining lovingly toward us, His dwelling in us and uniting Himself with us.

The Mass is the Lord’s memorial. We have tried to understand the word as richly and profoundly as possible; now we must go a step further. A “memorial” can commemorate only a person, not an earthquake or a particularly fruitful harvest. These can only be remembered. I can commemorate some beloved victim of the catastrophe or a loved one’s joy over a blessed autumn’s abundance. Commemoration always implies a person, and it presupposes a vital relationship to that person. Genuine commemoration is a projection of an already existing “we-relationship.”

This is precisely what we have in Holy Mass. The memorial which the Lord bequeathed us is not merely the memory of an event or the portrayal of a great figure; it is the fulfillment of our personal relation to Christ, of the believer to his Redeemer. In the Mass Christ comes in all His personal reality, bearing His salutary destiny. He comes not to just anyone, but to His own. Here again St. John brings this mystery into particularly sharp focus. God’s Son comes from heaven, from the Father, whom He alone knows. He lives from the Father’s vitality; everything He has and is, He has and is through the Father. But this intimate bond of love does not stop there. The Father sends His Son to men in order that He may pass on to them the divine life He has received. “As the living Father has sent me, and as I live because of the Father, so he who eats me, he also shall live because of me” (John 6:58).

When He became man, Jesus bridged the gulf between heaven and earth, between the Father and us once and for all. Henceforth He “is” with us in the sense that He belongs to us, is “on our side.” “Emmanuel,” the God-who-has-come. Yet in the special manner of the mystery, the Lord spans that gulf anew every time His memorial is celebrated. First, in the readings of the day, we receive word of Him. Then the offerings are prepared and there is a pause. By Consecration He comes to us, the subject of an incomprehensibly dynamic “memorial,” and gives us His grace-abounding attention. In Communion He approaches each of us individually and says: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock” (Apoc. 3:20). Insofar as the “door” swings open in genuine faith and love, He enters and gives Himself to the believer for his own.

This might be the place to mention the general significance of the Lord’s coming in the liturgy. What are the Christian implications of the word “feast”? When we stop to consider such things we must remember that our century has lost touch with certain ultimate mysteries. We are rationalists and psychologists, and reduce everything to the intellect or moral plane or to the subjective level of “experience.” Asked what a feast is, Easter, for example, we should probably reply something to the effect that Easter is the day on which we commemorate the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, that we joyfully praise God, that filled with faith and love, and hopeful of sharing in the graces of His Resurrection, we seek out the Lord, firmly resolving to live the new life He has made available to us.

Have we expressed the essence of Easter? Not yet, for we have not touched the reality that lies at its core, the unique manner in which the Lord’s Resurrection is renewed-not as a mere repetition, but so that He actually steps anew from eternity into our time, our presence. (Recall what was said in the chapter “Time and Eternity.”) And He comes in the plenitude of His whole redemptory life- each time in the particular mystery of the day that the unrolling liturgical year is commemorating: the mystery of God’s Incarnation, or His Epiphany, or His Passion, or His Resurrection and Ascension. He comes to us from the Father in the power of the Holy Spirit.

To wait for Him, to invite Him, to go to receive and honor and praise Him, to be with Him, drawn into the intimacy of Communion with Him-that is the Christian feast.

We begin to see how closely interwoven the concepts of the feast and the encounter are. They do not conflict, but mutually sustain each other. Each prevents the other from one-sidedness and falsehood. The concept of the coming, the encounter, guards the dignity of the person and protects the concept of the Supper from unseemliness and irreverence. It reminds us that Communion is not possession but exchange, like the reciprocal gaze of any genuine “we.” On the other hand, the concept of the Supper projects that of the encounter to the incomprehensible holy mystery of ultimate intimacy. Among human beings an encounter is always relative; it never completely embraces the other person. This last unbridgeable separation is the exigency of all created love. In Holy Communion the last vestige of distance is removed, and we are assured of an “arrival” that surpasses all created possibility, genuine union.

If we wish to read more about the life that flows to us from this mystery, we should turn to the letters of the Apostle Paul. The man who writes in the Epistle to the Galatians: “It is now no longer I that live, but Christ lives in me” is the evangelist of the totally “encountered” Christ, the “Christ in us.”

In the preceding chapter we concluded that participation in Holy Mass demands that we make our concept of the meal, the feast, a living one. Now we must add that participation in the Mass also consists in our awareness of our encounter with Christ, in the consciousness that He is about to come, is here in this room, is turning to me, is here! We must listen for and hear His knock on the door; we must profoundly experience His arrival and visit-without sentimentality or superexaltation but simply, calmly, in a faith that is all truth.

Romano Guardini

Meditations Before Mass