As a writer I sometimes feel crucified on two beams. The horizontal bar, a line from the Latin writer Publius Syrus: “I have often regretted my speech, never my silence.” The vertical, the words of the prophet Jeremiah: “If I say, ‘I will not mention [God], or speak any more in His name,’ then within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot.”
Nowhere is this truer than with the Eucharist. Blessed Columba Marmion, an Irish monk who died in the 1920s, wrote: “The mystery of the self-abasement of the Word-made-flesh plunges the apostle into such depths of wonder that he does not have the words to proclaim the glory which, according to the mind of God Himself, is to accrue to Jesus as a result of it. … In the case of the Eucharist, there is room only for pure faith.”
Knowledge of Christ in the sacrament of the altar is a knowledge that both depends upon words and ultimately cannot rest on words alone. If we want to go beyond what we know about it, we must cast ourselves completely, not into the complex tangles of human utterance, which can not only err, but even the best of which falls far short of the reality. Instead, we have to cast ourselves with total trust into what Christ Himself said in Scripture and what He says to us in the silence of our hearts.
Every time we risk putting experience into words, we risk flattening the many dimensions of that experience, bending lived reality into the far different nature of language. If this act can open experience up, it can also shut it down; if narration may trace the concealed nature of reality, it may also make that nature trickier, not simpler, for others to access. The trouble lies just as much in life as in language. To all that which we know in our senses is most real, we still struggle to do full justice in speech.
That is not to say that our words have no role. Still less is it to say that no words have a role. All the Church’s doctrine on the Eucharist, all our poetry praising Christ’s love in it, catch our fainting and fallible senses and shore up our faith. These words give us containers and frameworks for our experiential understanding, necessary guardrails against falsity and self-deception.
But it is not the words themselves but what they support, this knowing beyond words, that fascinates me as someone devoted to knowing the world through words. All our human language, let alone our actions, must ultimately fall quiet before the Eucharist. Here is the mystery so great that even the Word was careful of His words around it. All that we can and must say about it ought to lead us, in the end, to an open space in our hearts, a clear space where we not only know about Christ, but above all, love Him and live with Him. In this clear space created by profound interior silence, we can rest with Christ, in His peace, and emerge with new energy to resist the storms that rage around us.
I am struck too by the total humility of Christ in the founding of the Eucharist and the entrusting of it to faulty human hands. Rather than force our interpretation, He first states his case, then performs what He said He would do, and finally pours out His Spirit as guide. He leaves the rest to us. He allows himself to depend on us: most especially on His priests, but really on all of us, from the newest second-grader just old enough to receive to the sister just professed, from the empty-nest parents of five (or one or twelve) grown children to the centenarian almost ready for the last sacraments.
If I dared, I would cry out at the apparent error of this: Don’t You know what we are going to do to You, if You do this to Yourself? Don’t You know how clumsily, how carelessly, how cavalierly You are going to be handled, how unworthily You are going to be perceived, how many people are going to hurt You and how often? How many will fail to see You at all? How many times, and how foolishly, we will forget what we are doing in the very act of opening our mouths to receive Heaven itself?
He knew. He knows. Not for nothing do we call the Mass a re-presentation of what happened in the once-for-all sacrifice of Calvary. He trusts us not to hurt Him. On the way of the Passion, will we be the ones following after Him to bear witness in grief and love, or the ones holding the whips and spears? On the road to Emmaus, will we be those who come to know Him in the breaking of the bread, who beg Him to stay with us, or those who miss the journey because we are too busy clustering in corners out of fear and shame? Let us not shrink away, but rather chase down the Sacrament of Reconciliation that can welcome us back into a state of grace however far we may have strayed. Then we may instead hear how Christ reciprocates humanity’s words to him in the disciples’ unwitting invitation, how, in this most divinely ironic moment of hospitality, the “guest” becomes the host: Stay with me, for it is almost evening.
Katy Carl, editor of Word on Fire Luminor and author of As Earth Without Water https://www.wisebloodbooks.com/store/p115/katy-carl-as-earth-without-water.html
Featured Image: Duccio di Buoninsegna, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
