Christian
Contemplation and the Eucharist:
Dwelling in the Real Presence; Becoming the Real Presence
What is the goal of the Christian journey? Salvation?
Justification?
Heaven? The Kingdom
of God? Righteousness?
The early Christians
had a word that included all of these meanings and also went
far beyond.
They said the goal of the Christian Life was “Theosis”. It’s
a Greek word,
meaning to become as alike to God as it is possible for us
to become, literally to be divinised.
Sanctity or holiness in the Christian tradition is the journey
of the person towards this theosis, allowing the Sanctifier, the Holy
Spirit, to gradually heal and transform
us so that on every level of our being, body, mind, heart and
soul we approach what God wants us to become: saints. As far as the Christian
tradition is concerned the
goal God has for each of us is simply this, to undergo theosis;
to be remade into the image of Christ, to become a saint. As St. John says,
“We shall become like
Him, for we shall see Him as He really is”
(1
John 3:2).
This gradual journeying of the human being back to God is
made possible through the Incarnation of Jesus. His entry into our world opened
the path and the possibility for human beings to journey with and through Him
back to God. As St. Bonaventure says: “He
descended so that we could ascend.” And He did this through living a
human life and dying a human death.
Or as St. Augustine
poetically put it,
“Divine Wisdom has
assumed humanity and come close to human beings
by means of what is
closest to us.”
If this is true then how do we begin to approach this mystery?
How do we start the journey? In the tradition of the Church we have a
marvellous wealth of wisdom
that allows us to see how the sacraments and the life of prayer
relate to each other in this path of transformation that we have to walk. Both
are necessary and both inform the deeper practice of the other.
What are We?
However first we have to understand just what we are as
human beings. We need to get to know the raw material that will make this
journey. Again the early Christian writers can help us out here.
Over the first thousand years of the Church’s
existence these experts in contemplative being delved so
deeply into scripture and
contemplation and inner observation that they evolved a
marvellous spiritual anthropology that allows us to see how prayer,
contemplation and the Eucharist are interrelated and are necessary for this journey.
To the Fathers of the Church, human beings are often
described as fourfold creatures. We are made up of body, (soma), mind, (psyche),
soul (nous) and most importantly of
all spirit (pneuma). Now the words soul and spirit have
become somewhat mixed up nowadays but to the contemplative they have very
different
connotations. The soul is the seat of the human personality.
It is your “you” the place where your memory, will, imagination and capacity
for emotion
and relating are present. The spirit however is quite different.
It is the place where God dwells within the human being, the pure point of His
presence. It is distinct from us but present in us. As such it is an unfallen
place and always pure, while the previous three (body, mind and soul) are
fallen, and in need of the
redemption that only Christ can bring.
The best way to imagine it is to see it as St. Paul
describes it, we are earthen vessels carrying a heavenly
treasure (cf 2 Corinthians 4:7). If human beings had never fallen then
the soul would have
been in perfect communion with the spirit and had perfect
governance over the mind and the body.
The spirit as place and point of Divine Presence holding us
in being is present in every human person. Christ is
“the Light who enlightens all people”, but sadly
many are unaware of the divine presence dwelling within.
Prayer, repentance and sacramental grace gradually restore the harmony and order
of being that was meant
to be there from the beginning. This is the path of re-ascending
with Christ that the Christian aspires to. We begin that path through the
practice of
prayer.
What is Prayer?
But what do we mean by prayer? Let’s take a brief look at
what Jesus says to His followers about it in one important Gospel passage.
"And when you
pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they
love to pray standing
in the synagogues and on the street
corners to be seen by
men. I tell you the truth, they have
received their reward
in full.”
"But you, when
you pray, go into your inner room, close
your door and pray to
your Father who is in secret, and
your Father who sees
what is done in secret will reward you.”
(Mt 6:5-6)
Now, let us consider whom Jesus was addressing these words
to. In speaking to the ordinary people of the Palestine of His day He was
addressing mostly those who were poor. They would have lived in a one room
dwelling. So where was this inner
room he was speaking of? In fact the phrase “inner room” was
a well known image used by the rabbis of the day to illustrate the inner room
of the heart, the inner place of the spirit. The image of the closing of the
door was often used to indicate a turning inwards to a time of silence and
stillness. All this would have been quite familiar to those of his followers
who had heard the teachings of the rabbis.
However Jesus adds something new to this image. He tells us that
when we do become still and silent and enter into the inner place of the heart
then we will find that the Father is already present there. Again we have, from
Jesus’ own mouth, the teaching that God is already present at the heart of the
human being. To be there consciously in that place, the holy of holies of the
human being and rest in the presence of the Father is at the heart of this
teaching. Jesus is essentially
teaching his disciples the beginning of contemplative prayer.
This is a form of prayer that is to be of few words, grounded in the truth of
our own sinfulness but resting always on the promise of the divine presence within.
Down the ages this form of prayer will be characterised by an interior
intimacy, by silence and by attentive listening.
As the great St. Teresa of Avila said;
“prayer is simply
conversing with someone whom I already know loves me.”
One of the great stories from the Scriptures that illustrates
this intimate practice of prayer is that of Elijah in the cave. It was used so
extensively by the
desert fathers as a teaching tool that it must have been
handed down in
the early Christian communities as an image of true prayer. In
the book of the Kings we learn that Elijah has been persecuted for his fidelity
to the covenant of God and so, at the end of his tether, he takes off into the
desert to simply lie down and die. He has had enough, he is lost in desolation
and dryness. An angel appears twice and feeds him that he might have strength
for the journey into the desert and off he
trots until he comes to the cave where he dwells in prayer
until he is told that the Lord is about to reveal Himself to him. Let’s look at
what happens next:
“The LORD said, ‘Go
out and stand on the mountain in the
presence of the LORD,
for the LORD is about to pass by.’ Then a
great and powerful
wind tore the mountains apart and
shattered the rocks
before the LORD, but the LORD was not in
the wind. After the
wind there was an earthquake, but the
LORD was not in the
earthquake. After the earthquake came a
fire, but the LORD was
not in the fire. And after the fire came a
gentle whisper. When
Elijah heard it, he pulled his cloak over
his face and went out
and stood at the mouth of the cave.
Then a voice said to
him, ‘What are you doing here, Elijah?’”
(1 Kings 19: 11-13).
It is a beautiful and powerful story of the Lord renewing
the call of his prophet but, more than that, the story was also seen by the
Fathers as an indication of
the place the Eucharist plays in the contemplative path. It
is only after he has been fed the “bread of angels” that Elijah has the
strength for the journey
into the desert of prayer, where after descending into the
cave of the heart, he is then able to still his emotional turmoil enough that
he can come to such a calmness
that he is able to discern the presence of the Spirit of God
whose voice comes like a gentle breeze. In the story of Elijah and the cave we
have traced out for us
the whole Eucharistic – contemplative relationship. Here we
see revealed the Eucharist as the fuel for our contemplative journey while
being, at one and the
same time, the very goal of that journey; namely intimate
communion with Jesus Christ and through Him with the Father and the Spirit.
Now it is also worth noting that the Hebrew phrase for this
inner voice that Elijah hears may be translated a number of ways. In Hebrew it
is
“qôl d’mâmâh daqâh” (1 Kings 19:12) which literally
translates as: “a voice of murmuring silence” or “a breath-filled
voice” or even “a gentle breeze”.
Like many of the ancient languages Hebrew is a fluid and
poetic. To the Fathers all of
these senses were important as they united in themselves the
presence and revelation of the Holy Spirit as “ruah” The
living-breath-Spirit-wind of God. The importance of this is that it identifies
the Spirit who pours out on the Church the streams of
Sacramental Grace as the same Spirit who reveals to us the
inner presence of the Lord in our own spirit through the gift of prayer.
The Eucharist and Contemplative Prayer
So then, from the beginning of the Church the path of
Contemplative Prayer and the Eucharist are intimately connected — the one
inviting a deeper
participation in the other as the Catechism teaches:
“Entering into
contemplative prayer is like entering into the
Eucharistic liturgy:
we "gather up:" the heart, recollect our
whole being under the
prompting of the Holy Spirit, abide
in the dwelling place
of the Lord which we are, awaken our
faith in order to
enter into the presence of him who awaits
us. We let our masks
fall and turn our hearts back to the
Lord who loves us, so
as to hand ourselves over to him as
an offering to be purified
and transformed.” (Catechism of
the Catholic Church §2711)
This beautiful paragraph builds marvelously on what we have
just said (and traces every one of the steps that Elijah takes!). In a way, our
participation
in the Eucharist invites us again and again to trace the
contemplative path, and our taking a contemplative stance when celebrating the Eucharist
allows us to deepen our levels of understanding of and participation in this
great mystery.
St. Bonaventure reaffirms the importance of having this
contemplative
understanding of the Eucharist so as to be enabled to
participate as fully as
possible in this great mystery of love:
“Whoever draws
worthily near to the Eucharist obtains a quadruple grace. This
sacrament instills the
strength to operate; raises one to contemplation; disposes one
towards knowledge of
divine reality; animates and ignites contempt for the world
and the desire for
heavenly and eternal things, as it was said of Elijah who, with the force of
that food walked up to the mountain of God, saw divine secrets and stopped at
the entrance to the cave.”
According to Bonaventure the Eucharist becomes our “contemplative
viaticum”, which strengthens us on the way, while also deepening our gifts of
prayer and
contemplation. There is simply no escaping the reciprocal
relationship of contemplation and the Eucharist for the fathers, mothers,
saints and mystics of the Church. So what happens to us then when we take a contemplative
stance and begin the path of meditative prayer? How will it effect our
participation in the Eucharist?
Well one of the first things it does is to invite us to see deeply
the mystery that we celebrate. We begin to understand that what we are present
at is the representation
of the supreme moment of human history. There is an old
proverb that you will still hear in Italy from time to time. “At the table no one grows old.” It was co-opted
some years ago into a marketing campaign for one of those olive oil butter
substitute spreads. In the TV version of the advertisement we see a beautiful Mediterranean
family busily spreading branded olive oil over their bread
as the dulcet tones of the announcer claim that at THIS table no one grows old
… presumably because of the youth preserving qualities of olive oil. However
what many of us probably don’t know is that the marketing people got it wrong!
The table referred to in the old proverb is the table of the Eucharist, the
Altar. And the claim that at
this table no-one grows old was based on the faith of the early
Christians that the celebration of the Mass was a moment when we step into the
eternal now of God’s
presence so fully that we are no longer governed by time. We
are literally outside of time as “chronos”
while celebrating the Eucharist.
Now I’m sure you, like me, have been bored so often at some
Masses as the preacher drones on that you have looked at your watch frequently
and felt that no time was passing at all! But this isn’t what is meant here.
Rather there is the understanding that in some mysterious way we are participating
in an eternal moment: a nodal point of history where the eternal NOW of God intersects
human history in the crucifixion of Christ. Jesus being fully God and fully
human is the centre of this nodal point. Indeed it would be better to say that
He is the centrepoint of all history in that our story finds its origins, its
ongoing existence, and its fulfilment in Him. This means that our prayer life,
our desire to have relationship with God and to communicate with Him on ever
deeper levels of love —what we call the contemplative path in Christianity —
must always relate to and be centred upon the person of
Jesus. And if we centre our prayer life on Jesus as the one who reveals the
Father’s face then we will also
centre our life on the table where no one grows old, on the Mass. For this is the
place in time where we come face to face with the ultimate eternal act of
divine compassion, the sacrifice of Jesus as the lamb of God who takes away the
sins of the
World. The fathers saw this as the moment when the old pagan
understanding of time as the destroyer, Chronos
that eats up our lives by the minute
is conquered by the
intersection of the eternal dimension, the Kairos of Christ. The time of the new
and perpetual jubilee arrives with the incarnation of Jesus and His announcing
of the Kingdom and it remains forever open to us through His death and
resurrection. We
encounter these salvific moments that are at once historical
and eternal in every celebration of the Mass.
However, often we are too busy or distracted to be present to these
extraordinary events. Perhaps as Church we have spent so long talking about the
Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist that we have forgotten that we must
work on our side to be really present to Him!
Fostering a Contemplative Stance
The Contemplative Christian seeks to live always in the awareness
of this eternal dimension, this interpenetration of time and eternity. We live
in
incarnational awareness with the understanding that all of
creation has been rendered holy once again by the entry of Jesus into our
world.
So, in building contemplative moments into our days, moments
of prayerful pausing that allow us to come face to face with this mystery, or
as St. Clare puts it,
“to place our minds
before the mirror of eternity”
we create a chain of experience that enables us to begin to live in the presence of the
Lord here and now to be really present to the One who is
always present to us
Practices that help are as old as Christianity: Lectio
Divina, the praying of the psalms, the Jesus Prayer, the Rosary, the Divine
Office, Centering Prayer, Practice of the Presence of God, the Sacrament of the
Present Moment etc ...
All of these methods and many others have at their core the
goal of uniting the person with the presence of God who is present to them.
They allow us to journey like Elijah into the cave of the heart, there to wait,
to abide in stillness until the storms of emotions, stresses, and thoughts have
abated and we are calm enough to discern the voice of God within.
The Mass is of course at a completely different level of “practice”
but our participation in it may be deepened by applying to it some of the
techniques that come from the prayer practices that we have mentioned above.
Bringing times of stillness and quiet into our celebration of the sacred liturgy
are the most important. These times allow us a moment or two for the words of
the liturgy and the scriptures of the day to anchor themselves in our minds so that
we may have fuel for our prayerful pauses later that day. How often have you
left a celebration of Mass unable to
remember the readings that you have just heard? It happens
to me so often!
Following on from silence and stillness, the next most important
practice to bring to our celebration of the Mass is that of posture. We forget
at times that we are embodied! We are a psycho-biological entity that has a
sacramental
world view: in other words our bodies, and what they are
doing are just as important to how we pray as are our thoughts
and feelings. Indeed our thoughts and feelings will often be much better and
more deeply centred if our
posture is appropriate to what we are saying or thinking. There
is a body-language of prayer, commented on by the monastics of the Church from
the days of the desert
fathers. Moving from standing to sitting to kneeling to bowing
to prostrating reminds us of the truths we are celebrating and takes us out of
a “spectator mentality” so
often present in today’s liturgy. Where the body goes the mind
and heart will follow.
Arising then from our encounter with this eternal salvific moment
in the Mass we are in turn driven to deepen our prayer life such that we become
ever more aware of our need to be healed, to make this transformative journey
into theosis.
We become aware of our own soul-sickness, our sinfulness,
though without anxiety or fear; and at the same time we see that the perfect
remedy for that sickness has been provided in the Holy Eucharist. It is no
wonder then that one of the earliest images by which the Church described
itself was as the “ field hospital of humanity”: the place where those who know
they are sick come to in order to be healed.
It is interesting to not that the saints assure us that the
self-knowledge that arises through prayer would be too much for us if we didn’t
know that God has already
provided the means by which we may be healed. To the
earliest monks and nuns daily
Communion was encouraged as an inoculation
against sin. As St. Ambrose wrote:
“Anyone who
is wounded looks for
healing. For us it is a
wound to be liable to
sin. Our healing lies in the
adorable heavenly
Sacrament.”
St. Therese of Lisieux, a modern Doctor of the Church,
writes in her letters that nothing should prevent us from receiving the Lord,
not even our
sin. She goes on in one famous letter to teach that once we
have repented in heart and have the resolution to go to confession as soon as
is
possible we should be confident of the Lord’s mercy and go
to receive the medicine that He has provided for our healing. After all, we are
supposed to realise that the Eucharist is the medicine for sick sinners not the
reward for perfect saints. Otherwise the Lord would have waited until we enter
the heavenly life to
provide it. Of course we must co-operate with the grace
offered in this deepest communion with the Lord that the Eucharist offers.
Sometimes we forget that the Lord gave of himself in
Communion to all of the Apostles just before they would abandon and betray Him.
He does that for us as well. Our prayer therefore should be that if we fall we
will have the grace to
respond to His call to repentance like Peter and not fall into
despair like Judas.
So then, descending into the cave of the heart through
building a practice of meditative prayer so as to hear the still, small voice
of the Spirit is
the perfect preparation for participating in a deeper way in
the celebration of the Eucharist. As the Holy Spirit reveals to us our need to
be healed and renewed in the image and likeness of God we approach the
Eucharist to receive this
inner healing, we recognise that Jesus wants us to come to
Him, to be fed, healed and restored to enter into the fullness of our destiny
as saints, to
walk the path of theosis. The Eucharist will deepen
our prayer life and our prayer life will deepen our celebration of the
Eucharist, and in
this mutuality of experience the seeds of our future destiny
are sown, watered and cared for, until that day when we shall see Him face to
face and, please God, take our place at the eternal banquet of the Kingdom of Heaven.
