ARCHBISHOP John Bathersby of Brisbane has initiated a campaign of prayer for our spiritual renewal.
The Eucharist is the prayer of the Church par excellence. It provokes a life of continuing conversion.
We are not instant people. The patience of God has time for the whole of our lives. Yet the Eucharist nourishes our growth toward that final state when the first commandment will be fully realised within us: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind and with all your strength” (Mark 12:30).
Likewise, it resonates with the second commandment, prompting us to a growing concern and compassion for our neighbour: “You shall love your neighbour as yourself” (v31).
In this regard, every celebration of the Eucharist brings us closer to the goal. It pervades every dimension of our existence. Let me mention just four.
First, and most obviously, there is the religious or God-ward dimension.
To celebrate the Eucharist is to turn from the false gods of consumerism and selfishness to the living God. We are exposed to the depth and charm of an infinite love.
In that exposure, we adore, thank and praise God, and give ourselves over to his will.
In this respect, each eucharistic community is heeding what the First Letter of John demands, “Little children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).
By “lifting up our hearts” to the living God, we cause the idols of envy, greed and self-gratification to topple.
Then, there is what might be called the moral dimension.
We cannot lift up our hearts to God while closing them to our neighbour – especially to those with whom we celebrate the Eucharist; and beyond them, to the worlds of pain and suffering that demand our care – “for those who do not love a brother or sister whom they have seen, cannot love the God whom they have not seen” (1 John 4:20).
As one French writer said, “Some people imagine they love God because they love no one”.
There is a third dimension. It entails an openness to the truth that God has revealed, and a commitment to explore it.
Though this aspect is not often mentioned, the Eucharist nourishes us with a sense of reality.
It educates our minds to look beyond all worldly appearances and cultural prejudices. It calls us out of our private fantasies and personal projections. It faces us with the decisive reality that gives meaning and purpose to our lives and connects us to the whole of creation.
In this sense we speak of the “real presence” of Christ to us in the flesh and blood reality of our human existence: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God” (1 John 3:2).
This challenges any lofty spirituality that is incapable of imagining that God’s love could have such a human form – for the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.
When God so owns our human world, it can never appear the same again.
There is a fourth, even more human, dimension. It concerns our imaginations.
If we are to love God with our whole heart and soul and mind, that surely includes our powers of imagination.
If our imaginations are not engaged, our conversion to Christ would lack feeling and creativity.
There are humble uses of the imagination, say, in meditating on the traditional “joyful, sorrowful and glorious mysteries”.
In that way, we let the inexpressible mystery of God enter into our imagination. We begin to experience ourselves as participants in the Gospel story.
When the truth of God’s love is allowed to affect our imagination, it heals our imaginative lives of fearful and distorted images of God-and of ourselves.
It also inspires much of our art. A eucharistic imagination inspires great art, in music, painting, sculpture and poetry.
St Thomas Aquinas has left us not only his profound philosophical and theological reflections on the Eucharist, but also the great hymns, Adoro Te and Lauda Sion.
The Scriptures themselves abound in instances of a transformed imagination.
One of special beauty is found in the Letter to the Hebrews, as it reflects on the special character of God’s revelation in Christ.
It is hard to imagine that these words could have been written without an intimate experience of the eucharistic liturgy in the daily life of the Church:
“You have not come to something that can be touched, a blazing fire, and darkness, and gloom, and a tempest, and the sound of a trumpet, and a voice that made its hearers beg that not another word be spoken to Mt Zion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the firstborn who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks a better word than the blood of Abel” (Hebrews 12:18-24).
If we are to love God with a whole heart and soul and mind and strength, the Eucharist presents us with the “wholeness” to which we are called.
As the “whole heart” of the Church, the Eucharist inspires our hearts to expand to the limitless dimensions of God’s love.
As the “whole soul” of the community’s worship, each celebration gives soul and imagination to the life of faith.
As the “whole mind” of that living faith, the Eucharist brings us into contact with the whole truth of what has been revealed.
As the “whole strength” of the Church, it supports us in our weakness, and nourishes us with the sustenance we need on our pilgrim way.
The Eucharist then is a “conversion experience” – usually in an ongoing, non-dramatic form.
It deepens and broadens, day after day, week after week, the great change already worked in us by the Holy Spirit in calling us to faith.
Fr Anthony Kelly is a Redemptorist priest and Professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University in Brisbane.
