Eucharist - Faith and Hope

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, and that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

The Eucharist is not just a sacrament to be celebrated. It also must be the focus of our lives and the source of internal renewal.

In his apostolic letter Mane Nobiscum Domine, stay with us, Lord, Pope John Paul II described the Eucharist as a mode of being which passes from Jesus into each Christian.

He called on Christians to embrace that reality, be proud of our faith, and by their witness, promote a culture of the Eucharist that would serve to nourish, strengthen, and renew the life of all Christians.

Much could be said about what the Eucharist, lived with faith and interiority, teaches and what attitudes it progressively fosters.

It teaches us to make human life an act of thanksgiving and praise offered to God.

The Eucharist has been given to us so that our life, like that of Mary, may become completely a magnificat.

It teaches us that mankind is called to nourish itself with God and that men are in communion with God and with one another.

It is an authentic school of charity, of life redeemed by love, of sharing, of service, of attention to the most poor.

It is a great school of peace, as Pope John Paul II said.

We should be clear that the Eucharist isn't only teaching, a light to illuminate the path, but is also grace, an interior transformation, and the strength to put all these attitudes into practice.

Christian maturity lies in making our own the attitudes of faith, hope, and love.

The theological virtues, as they are traditionally called, are to become little by little the foundation of our very being, even to the point of progressively restructuring our psychological makeup.

The Eucharist is a very precious education for us in faith, hope, and love.

One of the primary characteristics of the Eucharist is that it is a mystery of faith. Only faith can truly immerse us in the understanding of this great sacrament.

This doesn't mean naive credulity with reason silenced. Faith and reason absolutely need each other and mutually support each other, as Pope John Paul II reminded us in his encyclical Fides et Ratio, faith and reason.

Reason without faith is at risk of becoming enclosed in a narrow vision of the world, while faith without reason can't satisfy our need to bring intelligence into play in seeking to understand what we believe as much as possible and to support the growth of faith.

Still, it's true that only faith gives us access to the deepest truths about the Eucharist.

This mystery, Saint John Paul II said, taxes our mind's ability to pass beyond appearances. Here our senses fail us. Visus, tactus, gustus in te fallitur, in the words of the hymn Adoro te devote.

Yet faith alone, rooted in the word of Christ handed down to us by the apostles, is sufficient for us.

When Saint John Paul II spoke of Mary in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, the Church of the Eucharist, the first trait that he evoked was Mary's faith.

He said, if the Eucharist is a mystery of faith, which so greatly transcends our understanding as to call for sheer abandonment to the word of God, then there can be no one like Mary to act as our support and guide in acquiring this disposition.

Frequenting the Eucharist fosters an attitude of faith in us. It teaches us not to trust in mere appearances, but to make the word of God the grounding of our perception of reality, with confidence in the truth of this word.

It obliges us not to remain at the level of our impressions, but to take seriously this word and the divine universe to which it gives access.

That helps us to get beyond rationalism, which imagines that the only reality is what reason can grasp by its own resources, and traps us in a narrow, suffocating view of this world.

This rationalist tendency has had a strong grip on the Western world for the past several centuries. But lately, it has provoked a reaction, visible in the fascination with the paranormal, horoscopes, magic, and so on.

Why were the Harry Potter books so popular? Because people need mystery and cannot be contented with the universe reduced to what logic and reason are able to comprehend.

The paradox of contemporary culture is its constant oscillation between narrow rationalism and fascination for the most obscure and most dangerous realm of the irrational.

We would do better to remain within the Christian tradition, where the need for the marvelous, the mysterious, and the transcendental coexist comfortably with realism and the demands of reason.

Supported by confidence in God's word and promises, accustomed by the Eucharist to seeing reality with the eyes of faith, we avoid allowing ourselves to be confined within a solely human wisdom and security.

We are constantly tempted to judge all reality by appearances or our own criteria, thus remaining incapable of entering into God's wisdom and discerning his action.

The result is that we are worried and forever discouraged, since instead of taking God's promises seriously, we prefer to trust in ourselves and our limited perceptions of the world.

Our most urgent need is to increase our faith.

Often we could say that the only real problem in the end is lack of faith. All other problems, confronted with faith, are not so much problems as occasions of human spiritual growth.

Everything is a grace, said Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, not long before her death. Even the worst difficulties, lived in faith and hope, sooner or later are turned to our advantage, disclosing hidden treasures more beautiful and precious than any we could have devised on our own.

The day we understand this will mark a great victory. We will be at peace with life. We will be more accepting of ourselves and our personal histories, more accepting too of others and more at peace with them. No longer will we find it necessary to spend our lives looking for others to blame or inventing scapegoats responsible for our unhappiness.

Veneration of the Eucharist is a way for us to strongly confess our faith in the truth of the word of God and to make that faith grow.

What we believe, even if it is sometimes partially obscured by our reason and puzzling to our senses, herein reveals itself as the supreme reality, a reality that doesn't disappoint us, but instead fulfills us beyond all expectations.

One writer says that from the beginning of time, Christ was hidden, first in the bosom of the Father, then in the form of a slave, and now in the sacrament as he instituted.

Faith finds him hidden in the bosom of the Father. No less does faith find him hidden in man. And it is faith which finds him hidden in the sacrament of the altar.

The celebration of the Eucharist, lived with faith and with love, and the hour spent in silent meditation before the Blessed Sacrament, all are certain finally to bring us to a true experience of God in which we see clearly that we are approaching the ultimate reality.

Sometimes, paradoxically, this mystery is so poor and confusing in appearances, it gives us moments of fullness and happiness surpassing anything earth can bestow.

Saint John Paul II in that encyclical Mane Nobiscum Domine spoke of an experience of the saints, and no doubt also of his own, when he said, how many times did they shed tears of profound emotion in the presence of this great mystery, or experience hours of inexpressible spousal joy before the sacrament of the altar.

The Eucharist permits us sooner or later to taste and see that the Lord is good, as Psalm 34 says. He places us in contact with the most real of realities, the God-love.

We can think that this sanctifying experience is destined to be the experience of all believers. In years to come, there will be more Eucharistic miracles, not necessarily extraordinary manifestations, but hearts transformed and psyches healed by contact with the Eucharist.

Through love of the Eucharist, we discover that an act of faith opens us to unexpected realities, which, although mysterious and puzzling to our human faculties, are no less sovereignly real, true reference points for our interior transformation and our human and spiritual growth.

Saint Paul congratulated the Colossians for the firmness of their faith. Faith will always remain in some sense a leap into the unknown, but faith is firm because the realities to which it gives access cannot deceive us. On the contrary, they fulfill us, make us live, and renew us internally from day to day.

The Letter to the Hebrews says, the righteous one lives by faith. And the church to come will find wisdom and extraordinary vitality in its Eucharistic faith.

In showing how the celebration of the Eucharist is a school of spiritual maturity, increasing the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, we began by showing how it fosters an attitude of faith in us and helps us experience how faith gives us access to wonderful, fruitful realities.

Now we can turn to the link between the Eucharist and hope. Hope is the confident expectation of the realization of God's promises. It turns us joyfully towards the world to come, the glory to which we are heirs in Christ, a glory without measure compared to the present sufferings.

Hope also is the virtue that leads us to accept poverty, never worried or discouraged by our weakness, but accepting everything in the mercy and love of God.

Hope is an attribute of the heart that helps us confidently await God's gifts while accepting our spiritual poverty. It is expressed and lived in a special way in the celebration and adoration of the Eucharist.

To understand this, we must understand the strong link between poverty and hope. We really can't go forward in hope according to Saint John Paul II's invitation unless we are poor of spirit. To the extent that we have riches, our place, our trust in security and human support, we can't really practice hope, which consists in counting on God alone.

God sometimes permits us to go through trials, the loss of some of our security, even lamentable falls, in order that we learn in the end to count on nothing but Him and His mercy.

Peter is a good example. He had to fall, denying Christ during his passion, in order to learn not to lean on his own virtues, his own courage, the momentum of human enthusiasm, but only on the love of Jesus.

Even in the spiritual domain, we are always tempted by riches. We want to be sure of ourselves, to have abundant stocks of grace, virtues, formation, and wisdom to support us, so we can calmly confront life's difficulties.

By definition, however, grace is not kept in reserve. It's humbly received day by day. It's like the manna that fed the Hebrews in the desert. When you tried to preserve it, it spoiled. We must gather it up each day.

This is not to say there's no need to exercise virtue and grow, but we must not lean on ourselves and create false security in doing so.

In the Our Father, when we confide our needs to God, who knows them better than we do, we do not ask for a store of bread. We ask for the bread for each day, just what's necessary for today, forgetting the past and not worrying about tomorrow.

Therefore, we're told in Saint Matthew, do not be anxious for tomorrow, for tomorrow will be anxious for itself. Let the day's own trouble be sufficient for the day.

Embracing hope, then, implies acceptance of our weakness and poverty, living in a sort of permanent precariousness, without genuinely satisfying human support, neither within us nor without, yet at the same time possessing a limitless confidence in the faithfulness and bounty of God.

This attitude, in the end, is a source of much freedom and joy. Freedom, since the more we rely on our own riches, the more we work with a certain amount of worry, fearful of losing one thing or another, and tempted to indulge in ceaseless calculation and measurement, while we're never really free.

Joy, since someone who looks to God for everything knows the happiness of experiencing his faithfulness and day by day receiving everything necessary from him, from the hand of one who loves us and whom we love, and so the heart is filled with gratitude and love.

The Eucharist is, as it were, the manna that feeds us in our destitution in the desert, giving us just what is necessary, neither more nor less, day by day.

The Church's liturgy has always liked to use Psalm 23 as a communion hymn. Many of its verses can be interpreted in reference to the Eucharistic mystery. It speaks of a meal. “You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies. You anoint my head with oil, my cup overflows” (Ps. 23:5).

There is joy in the divine presence. “Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, and I shall dwell in the house of the Lord forever” (Ps. 23:6).

And its opening words, “The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want” (Ps. 23:1), form one of the most beautiful prayers that we can say after receiving communion. Thanks to this communion, I lack nothing. I am certain God has given me absolutely everything necessary for today.

One writer said the Eucharist is the gift of God in his fullness. It gives us everything we need to accomplish God's will in giving us ourselves.

If we have this faith, God will respond to our confidence, and communions will be even more fruitful.

Our Lord often says in the gospel, “According to your faith, let it be done to you” (Matt. 9:29). And Saint Paul in the second letter to the Corinthians says, “God is able to provide you with every blessing in abundance, so that you may always have enough of everything and may provide in abundance for every good work” (2 Cor. 9:8).

Nowhere is that more true than in the Eucharist, where the resplendent mystery of the love of God, who made himself incredibly poor for us, enriches us with the fullness of his love and his life. What an awesome exchange. The poorness of God becomes our richness.

In Eucharistic adoration, the act of gathering like poor ones before Jesus who is so poor, there's little else we can do there, helps us to accept our poverty and transforms it into a place for welcoming the gift of God, who is in the end our only wealth.

One writer said, source and end of all Christian prayer, adoration is the engagement of the person himself at the special place where we reach the limit of acts and words. Adoration unfolds on a fountain of accepted poverty. Adoration is the prayer of the poor. “Open your mouth wide,” says the Psalms, “and I will fill it” (Ps. 81:10).

When Peter speaks to the leaders of the churches of whom he is one, he reminds them that a minister of the church, before assuming a ministry, is first of all someone who has had a spiritual experience.

So I exhort the elders among you, says Saint Peter, as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is to be revealed. He knew the fervent love of God manifested in the sufferings of Christ, and that led him to live in the fullness of hope for the glory and beauty of the world to come.

We encounter these two realities in the Eucharist. It is the reminder that makes the Lord's passion present today. During each mass, we are mystically the contemporaries of the cross. But it is also the anticipated presence of the world to come.

The Eucharist makes us participants in the sufferings of Christ, while making us part of the glory and happiness of the next life. It orients and nourishes the hope of the Christian. It intensifies our desire for the second coming.

We await, says one writer, the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior Jesus Christ. The Eucharist, celebrated with fervor, makes this hope more and more a certainty and strengthens our commitments here below. Nothing is more enlivening than hope. Despair or worry quickly diminishes the generosity of love.

In his apostolic letter Mane Nobiscum Domine, Saint John Paul arose that while the Eucharist makes present what occurred in the past, it also impels us towards the future, where Christ will come again at the end of history. This eschatological aspect makes the sacrament of the Eucharist an event which draws us into itself and fills our journey with hope.

The Holy Father also expressed beautifully the link between the Eucharistic celebration and the future kingdom. This relationship of profound and mutual abiding enables us to have a certain foretaste of heaven on earth. Is this not the greatest of human yearnings? Is this not what God had in mind when he brought about in history his plan of salvation?

God has placed in human hearts a hunger for his words, we're told in the book of Amos, a hunger which will be satisfied only by full union with him. Eucharistic communion was given so that we might be sated with God here on earth, in expectation of our complete fulfillment in heaven.

Hope plays a key role in the dynamism of the spiritual life. Founded on faith, it permits the blossoming of charity. It purifies the heart, according to the beautiful expression of Saint John, when he says, “Everyone who thus hopes in him purifies himself as he is pure” (1 John 3:3). Thus it permits us to see God at work.

As Saint John of the Cross said in words that delighted Saint Thérèse of Lisieux, it is the source of all graces. The soul obtains, he says, from God as much as it hopes for him.

God doesn't give according to our merit, our virtues, or our qualities, but according to our hope in him, our confidence in his mercy. There is an immense consolation and freedom in understanding that.

May each of our Eucharistic celebrations be then an occasion to manifest and nourish the joyful pride in our hope, as we are told in the Letter to the Hebrews, that must dwell in the heart of every Christian. To maintain a joyful outlook on all things is perhaps the greatest service believers can provide for today's world.

With great reason, we could say that aspiration, “Come, Lord Jesus” (Rev. 22:20).

Saint Peter, in his first letter, expresses an exhortation addressed to the elders of the church. He said, “So I exhort the elders among you as a fellow elder and a witness of the sufferings of Christ, as well as a partaker in the glory that is to be revealed. Tend the flock of God that is your charge, not by constraint but willingly, not for shameful gain but eagerly, not as domineering over those in your charge, but being examples to the flock” (1 Pet. 5:1–3).

One idea in this beautiful exhortation seems particularly interesting. When the head of the apostles refers to himself in his own quality as an elder, he doesn't first define himself in terms of function or task in the community. First, he evokes a spiritual experience. He, an elder, is witness of the sufferings of Christ and is to participate in the glory that will be revealed.

The role of the elder appears first of all to have a double spiritual link: to the passion of our Lord and to the future glory of the kingdom. Within this double spiritual link, those with responsibility in the church find the strength needed to be good shepherds in the image of Jesus, full of care, humility, and disinterested love towards those entrusted to them.

Here is where one acquires pastoral charity. Even if this message concerns priests in particular, it has relevance for all Christians alike. The elder is the witness of the sufferings of Christ. Even if not a visual witness, as Peter, the elder, has been, someone who has attained true spiritual maturity deeply understands the mystery of the Lord's passion.

He or she has grasped the idea that what drove Jesus to accept the sufferings and outrages of the cross was love beyond all speaking. He or she has understood what an unending richness of mercy, of grace, of healing of hearts is contained in the wounds of our Lord. In the same letter, Peter evokes those wounds by which you have been healed.

The elder is someone who remembers Jesus Christ, who constantly reminds us of Christ's suffering and passion, and who brings together in this memory the desire to imitate Christ in giving his or her life for friends and the necessary courage, despite weakness and poverty, to let himself or herself little by little be clothed in the very righteousness of Christ Jesus.

The elder is also someone who lives in the perspective of the future glory, who reminds us not only of the past but also of the future, which is certain, thus providing a foretaste of the happiness and glory that will be revealed when Christ returns. Peter did so in his second letter, evoking the day of the Transfiguration when he was with the Lord on the holy mountain as an eyewitness of divine majesty, an experience that filled him with confidence in the power of our Lord Jesus Christ and in his coming again.

Filled with hope for the kingdom, the elder inhabits, as it were, a new world, crying out to be realized in splendor and beauty. And from this, he receives a powerful interior force. Having perceived with the eyes of the heart this inheritance which is imperishable, undefiled, and unfading, kept in heaven for you, he trembles with joy.

Thus, the activity of every minister of Christ is rooted in a double contemplation, a double communion, we might say, with the passion of our Lord and with the glory of the world to come. This double contemplation occurs and is deepened in a very special way in the liturgy of the church. Meditation on the word of God revives in us Christ's memory, which was announced by the prophets and the Psalms and revealed in the Gospels. It also moves us to see the splendor of the heavenly Jerusalem, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband, as we are told in the book of Revelation.

This sort of contemplation is at its maximum intensity in the celebration of the Eucharist, memorial of the passion of the Lord and guarantee of the glory to come. At Mass, it is as if time is suspended. In faith, we are made contemporaries of Christ's cross in a way hidden, yet absolutely real, just like those who were present at the event. We can take part in the sufferings of Christ and can be beneficiaries of the rivers of forgiveness and peace that spring from the cross.

Like the good thief, we can be purified by the blood of the Lamb without blemish. We can find our nourishment and our life in the mercy and love of God. At each Eucharistic celebration, we are invited to take part in this kingdom to come. In the bread and wine consecrated on the altar, the kingdom of God is mysteriously but truly present in all its fullness and its richness. And we have access to it through faith.

An anticipation of heavenly glory, the Eucharist makes present here below this kingdom of peace, of harmonious love, of sweetness and beauty which is the object of our peace, that new world to which we all aspire, receiving us as a foretaste. We desire it all the more and say, “Maranatha, come, Lord Jesus. Let grace come and let this world pass away.”

Each Eucharist, if lived with lively faith and fervent prayer, makes us taste how the Lord is good, how sweet it is to praise him and to love him, to live in his presence, and share all together the same life and the same love.

It makes us yearn to manifest to all the world the glorious reality hidden in the humility of the sacramental species, veiled by appearances from our bodily eyes. The Eucharist transports us to the heavens, not in order to flee the realities of this world, but to give us a firm hope, to nourish our charity, and so give us the courage needed to assume the responsibility of this life and enter into its struggles.

Here is the real condition for being an elder. Here is the real spiritual maturity. A deep faith that makes us share intimately in the passion of the Lord and the glory of the world to come. It's this sharing that gives our present life all its fruitfulness. This was strongly experienced by the first Christian generation.

They were still very close to the events of our Lord's life and wished for his imminent coming in glory, which they knew would be hastened through their prayers and desire. So the celebrations were marked with extraordinary fervor, which gave the church great apostolic zeal.

After 2,000 years, and a certain dimming of the eschatological sense, all this may be difficult for us. Yet the Spirit today invites us to regain this same spiritual intensity, this same mystical identification with the cross and with glory, especially in our liturgies. May our celebrations move us to share with intense faith in the mystery of Christ handed down to us and in the splendor of the kingdom to come, so that hope and charity may be renewed in us.

John Paul II liked to call Our Lady “the woman of the Eucharist.” He liked to recall how Our Lady would have received holy communion from the hands of Saint John in the masses he celebrated after the ascension of our Lord. We can ask Our Lady, woman of the Eucharist, to help us truly also to be people of the Eucharist.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and Lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW

From Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God, Chapters 7, 8 & 10 by Jacques Philippe (Scepter, 2016).