A Eucharistic Life
If you are new to this series, you can find part one here and part two here.
As we begin to think of how the experience of Eucharist forms us to live as Christians, we might start with another thought by Fr. Schmemann: “We know that as Christians and insofar as we are Christians we are, first of all, witnesses of that end: end of all natural joy; end of all satisfaction of man with the world and with himself; end, indeed, of life itself as a reasonable and reasonably organized “pursuit of happiness.” Here we find an unmistakable parting of ways between two manners of living, a fork in the road into paths between which Jesus Christ through the Eucharist leads us to choose. Will we continue, by grace experienced within ‘that holy fellowship of all faithful people,’ in the life of the world that is and is to come? Or will we return to the isolated and isolating life of enclosure within ourselves, the life of death in the world that is and will have been?
Will we choose Eucharist or anti-eucharist? The first way is the way Christ Himself teaches us as we approach Him, adore Him, partake of Him, and commune with Him. It is the way of self-donation, of grateful reception, of unification with God the Trinity, and of the eternal peace of the Kingdom. It is the experience of knowing, as Julian of Norwich did, that ‘all shall be well and all manner of thing shall be well.’ The second way is the way of self-reservation, of egotism, of looking out with envy on a world of light and life through the keyhole of dark rooms that lock from the inside. It is to experience the horror–and ultimately the hell–of what St. Augustine called ‘man turned inward toward himself.’
The way of Eucharist teaches us to cherish God’s Creation enough to look along with it as it proclaims something beyond and beneath and above itself. The way of anti-Eucharist teaches us to respond to Creation by retreating deeper within ourselves, to conscript the world into a drama of vain imaginations--the city of Babel and Pandemonium under construction within and around us. The way of Eucharist is the fertility and virility of new creation, of eternal life invading death. The way of anti-eucharist is sterility, a world of phantasmic and hellish projections of a self that grows thinner and grainier the more it is flung forward through time.
As we now start to prepare for the Lenten season, my prayer is that we leave behind that lesser way and choose Christ again. We need not seek for some mountain-top experience of Him, some ecstatic or enthusiastic revivalism. We need only to be present this Sunday for Holy Communion. It is our weekly altar-call, revival, and renewal. By doing so, we will be trained to see life differently; eyes that behold the Christ of Eucharist will be eyes trained to look for Jesus everywhere. He leads us in this way through the world so that when we come to the world’s end we will see Him.
There is no proper notion of Christian ascent that does not love in some way the fact of feet on the ground. If we are to experience the ecstasies of prayer, we must always begin in the quiet and common house of ordinary Christian faithfulness. We will not be led to exercise our particular charismatic gifts in the Spirit if we disdain to receive the gift to which the Lord has called us in order to remember Him.
It is in this necessary ordering of our devotion that we are led forward into healing as those who had once been broken and corrupted by the Fall. Our Lord is the true Physician and Lover of souls. He will not let us go forward hiding that grievous wound we inherited from our first parents. To enter the Kingdom, we must go back to that place where the Fall caused us to drop off. As Schmemann notes, since we fell through eating, why should we not be redeemed through eating? Is this not the poetic symmetry that so characterizes our Lord’s redemptive work? Every Eucharist is the opportunity to go and find Him there back at the Tree where it all went wrong, to find Him waiting there ready to heal our piece of that fragmented human life. Those who seek Him here will find Him there. And once that work has begun, only then will we be led to go forward. To love and receive Christ in the Eucharist is to go forth transformed by His power to be Eucharist in the world.
The mission of the Church is to testify to the truth of Christ as He has been revealed. Having seen and heard, having tasted and touched, we go forth to bear witness of these things to those who do not know. Love reorders life, and the manner of our life cannot remain the same if we believe that God is here among us and within us. We will come to see him in the eyes of those who bear His likeness. Eucharist returns us with renewal to our families and friends. Eucharist sends us forth to the stranger and to the poor and needy with eyes to see them as those for whom Christ died and rose again. Eucharist makes us even to see into the eyes of our enemies and to find Christ there working for their redemption.
It is my hope that in these meditations we have come to love Jesus Christ in the Eucharist a little bit more. To love Him there is to begin to know now the life of the world to come, which is His own life. To love Him in that life is to begin now to live in the Kingdom of God, the world of Eucharist that, as the dying world passes away, will be revealed from glory to glory as we behold at the last the Lord of the Feast Himself and dwell with Him forever.
Hear His words: “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. 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. As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me. This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live forever.”