The Eucharist and Love

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, 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 fundamental dynamism of Christian life, as we know, consists in the practice of faith, hope, and charity, with the Eucharist as the source and summit of the Church’s life, expressing and nourishing these three theological virtues.

That the Eucharist is the sacrament of charity above all—expressing and nourishing the love of God as well as love of neighbor—is an incontrovertible truth.

The Eucharist is the highest expression of divine charity, of God’s love for His [creations]. Through it, God shows how much He wants to be with us forever, sharing His own life with us, living with us and in us.

As one writer says, “What makes the Eucharist the sacrament of love is that Jesus here gives himself in person, in the fullness of his presence. He gives all that he is, the entirety of his life. More than any word or action, it is Jesus himself who comes to us and delivers himself into our hands. The Eucharist is a giving without limits on Our Lord’s part: ‘This is my body, given up for you’” (Jean-Claude Sagne, L’itinéraire spirituel du couple: Le Mystère de l’amour dans le mariage).

What we receive in the Eucharist is Jesus in the very act of giving His life for all mankind, the act in which He personally loves each one of us with the greatest of loves. In St. John we’re told, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends” (John 15:13).

Each time we receive the Eucharist, we should be moved with the same awe that St. Paul had, in knowing that “he loved me and gave himself for me,” as he says in the Letter to the Galatians (Gal. 2:20).

John Paul II, in one of his final encyclicals, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, (“The Church [from] the Eucharist”) reminds us that “we can say not only that each one of us receives Christ, but also that Christ receives each one of us” (John Paul II, Encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Point 58, April 17, 2003).

There we have all the dynamism of love, as a welcoming and a gift at the same time, for to love someone is to welcome him or her into your life. These two movements are deeply linked. Isn’t the biggest gift we can give someone to accept him or her as he or she is?

One writer says, “If the biggest desire of love is to remain with the other, to find an abode in the other’s heart—and for that to make of oneself an abode for the loved one—the Eucharist is the sacrament of love par excellence. Jesus once again makes his heart a welcoming abode for all mankind” (Jean-Claude Sagne, ibid.).

This is the profound truth announced in the Gospel of John: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him” (John 6:56).

St. Catherine of Siena used a certain image to express this. By receiving Communion, she said, the soul dwells in God and God in the soul, “as the fish is in the sea and the sea in the fish,” so [is God] in the soul and the soul in [God], the sea of peace (Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue).

The Eucharist makes clear the degree of intimacy into which God wants to draw us. In the Eucharist, the mad dream of all lovers is realized: to be one in being with the object of our love.

God lets Himself be eaten by us; He becomes our substance, and at the same time, He draws us out of ourselves to make us His.

There’s an interesting reflection by Pope Benedict XVI in a homily that he gave. He says, “Christ is truly present among us in the Eucharist. His presence is not static. It is a dynamic presence that grasps us, to make us his own, to make us assimilate him. Christ draws us to him, he makes us come out of ourselves to make us all one with him” (Benedict XVI, Homily, May 29, 2005).

St. Augustine understood this well. Educated in Neoplatonism, he found it difficult to accept the incarnational dimension of Christianity. In particular, he reacted against the idea of a “Eucharistic meal,” which seemed to him to be unworthy of God.

In normal everyday meals, we are the strong ones, since we assimilate the food and make it part of our bodily reality. Only later did St. Augustine understand that in the Eucharist, it is the other way around: Christ draws us to Himself, making us one single thing with Him.

The Eucharist means nourishing ourselves with God, but also—if we can say so—letting ourselves be devoured by Him!

The real excellence of the Eucharist lies in the fact that God not only gives us His love but gives us the gift of loving in return. Through it, He empowers us to respond to His love little by little, to love just as we have been loved by Him.

Here is a reminder of an essential property of love, ever expanding towards full reciprocity: to love someone is to give him or her the possibility of loving us back.

The greatest gift we can give someone is the power of self-giving, to experience the happiness of giving ourselves through love, since, we’re told in the Acts of the Apostles, that “it is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

The Eucharist comes to the aid of our weakness. It transforms our hearts of stone into hearts of flesh, hearts capable of love—even God’s love; it assimilates us and makes us conform to Christ little by little.

It is like a security deposit, carrying with it the hope that one day we will be able to love God as He loves us, with the same truth, the same purity, the same strength, the same generosity. “Hope does not disappoint us,” says St. Paul, “because God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us” (Rom. 5:5).

Each Communion is a diffusion of the spirit of love into the hearts of the faithful. Through it we are in touch with Jesus’ love for His Father, and we participate in Our Lord’s compassion and infinite tenderness towards every child of God. Here, Jesus comes secretly but truly, to live and love in us, communicating His interior disposition of docility and humility.

We should desire it intensely, while also waiting patiently for what the Eucharist sows within us to bear visible fruit, and knowing that it can produce very profound changes in our hearts. “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life” (John 6:54). And eternal life is no less than loving with God’s own love.

Uniting us to Christ, the Eucharist also integrates us into the community of brotherly love. As the sacrament of God’s love, the Eucharist is of course also a sacrament of love of others, of communion with our brothers and sisters.

It expresses and effects people’s most profound togetherness, making possible the kind of community that Christ makes possible in making us members of one body.

We’re told in St. Paul, “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor. 10:16-17).

St. John Chrysostom said: “If it’s the same body that nourishes us, and we all become this same body, why do we not also show the same love? Christ is united with you, who are so far away, and you don’t deign to unite yourself to your brother? … In fact, it isn’t the case that one body is nourished by one member and another by another; it’s the same body that nourishes all. That’s why St. Paul added: ‘we all share the same bread.’ So then, if we all share the same bread, if we all become the same in Christ, why don’t we share the same charity? … That’s what we saw in the time of our fathers. We’re told in the Acts: ‘the company of those who believed were of one heart and one soul’ (Acts 4:32).

“It isn’t the same at the present; it’s just the opposite. And yet, it’s Christ who came to look for you, you who were so far from him, to unite himself to you. And you, you don’t want to be united [with] your brother? …

“In fact, he didn’t only give his body; but since the first flesh, drawn from the earth, was killed by sin, he introduced, in a sense, another leavening, his own flesh, of the same nature as ours but free from all sin, full of life.

“The Lord shared him with us all so that, nourished by this new flesh, each one in communion with the others, we can enter into eternal life” (John Chrysostom, Homilies on the First Letter to the Corinthians).

Writing to priests on Holy Thursday in 2005, Pope St. John Paul II said: “Christ’s self-giving, which has its origin in the Trinitarian life of the God who is Love, reaches its culmination in the sacrifice of the Cross, sacramentally anticipated in the Last Supper.

“It is impossible to repeat the words of consecration without feeling oneself caught up in this spiritual movement. In a certain sense, when the priest says the words, ‘take and eat,’ the priest must learn to apply them also to himself, and to speak them with truth and generosity.

“If he is able to offer himself as a gift, placing himself at the disposal of the community and at the service of anyone in need, his life takes on its true meaning” (John Paul II, Letter to Priests for Holy Thursday, Point 3, March 13, 2005).

What is true for priests is true for all the faithful. In the Eucharist we nourish ourselves with Christ, to be ourselves made ever more capable of being food for our brothers and sisters, a response to their hunger for love.

The life of…St. Thérèse of Lisieux is a powerful example of how the Eucharist can transform one internally and make him or her capable of the most heroic love. At the age of fourteen, Thérèse had big expectations for a life filled with love, but she was humanly incapable of that—too entangled in her hypersensitivity, her timidity, her emotional fragility.

Then God mercifully intervened in her life by the grace of Christmas, and she describes what happened just after midnight Mass, considering it a Christmas grace that was explicitly Eucharistic in nature. This Christmas grace made it possible for her to undertake an extraordinary growth in love.

She says, “The work I’d been unable to do in ten years was done by Jesus in one instant, contenting himself with my good will. … He made me a fisher of souls. … I felt charity enter into my soul and the need to forget myself herself and to please others; [and] since then, I’ve been she has been happy! (Thérèse of Lisieux, Story of a Soul).

At the end of her life, Thérèse would undergo a major trial of her faith, obsessed with horrible thoughts of doubt and disbelief. She offered up this trial for atheists, who in the…nineteenth century were aggressively anticlerical and scornful.

There’s something Eucharistic in the way she expresses her acceptance of this trial for as long as God [willed] it:

“Your child, O Lord,” she said, “has understood your divine light, and she begs pardon for her brothers. She is resigned to eat the bread of sorrow as long as you desire it; she does not wish to rise up from this table filled with bitterness at which poor sinners are eating until the day set by you. Can she not say in her name and in the name of her brothers, ‘Have pity on us, O Lord, for we are poor sinners! … Oh! Lord, send us away justified’” (ibid.).

How moving it is that the us with whom St. Thérèse identifies includes the worst enemies of the Church in her day. Like Jesus, she takes upon herself the sins of the world. There’s no judging others, only immense compassion and complete solidarity with the sin of nonbelievers.

This is one aspect of the Eucharist’s great mystery of mercy: Jesus at the sinners’ table, offering His life and His body, making Himself food that heals the sins of the world, by love offered the bread of misery (this expression was used in the Jewish Passover meal) becomes the Bread of Life: “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29)!

The Eucharist is at the same time a gift and an imperative, a call and a promise, responsibility and grace. It is a powerful invitation to love as Jesus loves, to give one’s life for our neighbor as He did.

But it is also the assurance that one day, however great our weakness or misery may be, we will be raised to this height.

The host we receive at Mass or adore in silence is humble as a mustard seed—and like a seed, it can blossom in our hearts into a tree where the birds can come to nest and find solace. Like a little bit of leaven, it is capable of profoundly transforming our hearts, making loaves of bread that can satisfy much hunger.

We can give a lot of thanks to God for having remained among us. We can make atonement to Him and express our joy to Him for having Him so close to us. Adoro te devote, latens Deitas. “O Godhead hid, devoutly I adore you,” says St. Thomas Aquinas. We can repeat this many times each day from the very depths of our heart.

When we visit the Blessed Sacrament, we’ll be able to say slowly to Our Lord, with love, Plagas, sicut Thomas, non intueor…:

“I do not see your wounds as Thomas saw them,
But I confess that you are my God.
Make me believe ever more and more
In you my hope, in you my love to store” (Thomas Aquinas, Hymn, Adore Te Devote).

It was faith in the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist that led to devotion to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament outside of Mass as well.

In the first centuries of the Church, the Sacred Species were reserved so that Communion could be taken to the sick and to those who were in prison awaiting martyrdom because they had confessed their faith.

As time went by, the faith and love of believers caused them to make both public and private devotion to the Holy Eucharist far richer. Their faith led them to treat the Body of Christ with the greatest possible reverence and this also led to greater public devotion.

We can find many testimonies in the most ancient documents of the Church to the veneration [by] the early Christians which later was to make way for the feast that we celebrate on Eucharistic feast days.

Our Lord and Our God is in the Tabernacle. Christ is in the Tabernacle, and it’s there that we must show Him our adoration and our love.

This veneration for Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament is expressed in many ways: in the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, in processions, in prayer before Our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament, with genuflections that are real acts of faith and of adoration.

John Paul II says, “The Church and the world have great need of Eucharistic devotions. Jesus is waiting for us in the sacrament of Love. Let us not be sparing in the time we spend going to meet him in adoration, in contemplation filled with faith, and let us be prepared to make reparation for the many grave faults and offenses committed against him in the world. May our adoration never cease” (John Paul II, Letter, Dominicae Cenae, Point 3, February 24, 1980).

We too will experience the happiness and the joy of being with Him. If we see Him pass through our streets exposed in the Monstrance, we will tell Him from the depths of our hearts how much He means to us.

St. Josemaría in Christ is Passing By said, “Adore him reverently and devoutly; renew in his presence the sincere offerings of your love. Don’t be afraid to tell him that you love him. Thank him for giving you this daily proof of his tender mercy, and encourage yourself to go to Communion [in] a spirit of trust.

“I am awed by this mystery of Love. Here is the Lord seeking to use my heart as a throne, committed never to leave me, provided I don’t run away” (Josemaría Escrivá, Christ is Passing By, Point 161). Our Lord is happier on this throne of my heart than in the most magnificent Monstrance.

For many years God fed manna to the people of Israel as they wandered in the wilderness. This was an image and symbol of the pilgrim Church and of each individual who journeys towards his or her definitive homeland—Heaven.

That food given in the desert of Sinai is a figure of the true food, the Holy Eucharist. John Paul says, “This is the sacrament of the human pilgrimage. … Precisely because of this, the annual feast of the Eucharist that the Church celebrates [contains within its liturgy] so many references to the pilgrimage of the people of the Covenant in their wanderings through the wilderness” (John Paul II, Homily, Point 5, June 4, 1988).

Moses often reminded the Israelites of this wonderful deed that God had performed for His people: “Do not forget the Lord your God,” we’re told in the Book of Deuteronomy, “who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Deut. 8:14).

Each day we can make it a day of thanksgiving and of joy, because God has wanted to remain with us in order to feed us and strengthen us, so that we [may] never feel alone. The Holy Eucharist is also the viaticum, the food for the long journey of our days on earth towards the goal of true Life.

Jesus accompanies us and strengthens us here in this world, where our life is like a shadow compared to the reality that awaits us.

Earthly food is a pale image of the food that we receive in Holy Communion. The Holy Eucharist, says St. Luke, opens up our hearts to a completely new reality.

We can turn to Our Lady, whom St. John Paul liked to call “the woman of the Eucharist” (John Paul II, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, Point 53), and ask her that we might truly grow in our love and devotion to the Eucharist on a daily basis.

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

A part is from Fire & Light: Learning to Receive the Gift of God, Chapter 9 by Jacques Philippe (Scepter, 2016).