Sacrament of Unity
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June 2, 2018“While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, gave it to them, and said, ‘Take it; this is my body.’ Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, ‘This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.’” (Mk 14:22-24)
From Pope Benedict XVI:
“The ‘bread’—the new manna that God gives to us—is one and the same Christ for all. It is truly the one Lord himself whom we receive in the Eucharist, or better: the Lord who received us and makes us part of him.
Saint Augustine declared this in a saying that he had heard in a sort of vision: ‘Eat the bread of the strong, and yet you will not change me into yourself; rather I will transform you into me.’ In other words, the bodily nourishment that we consume is assimilated by the body and itself becomes a structural component of the body. But this bread is of another sort. It is greater and more substantial than we are. We do not assimilate it into ourselves, but rather it assimilates us into itself, so that we are conformed to Christ—in Paul’s words, as members of his body, one in him.
We all ‘eat’ the same man, not only the same thing; in this way we are all wrested from our self-enclosed individuality and drawn into a greater one. We all are assimilated into Christ, and so through communion with Christ we are also identified with one another, identical and one in him, members of one another. To be in communion with Christ is by its very nature to be in communion with one another as well. No more are we alongside one another, each for himself; rather, everyone else who goes to communion is for me, so to speak, ‘bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh.’
A true spirituality of communion, therefore, together with its Christological depth, necessarily has a social character also…. It is when the Eucharist is understood in the full intimacy of the union of each individual with the lord that it automatically becomes also a social sacrament in the highest degree.”
( On the Way to Jesus Christ, 117-8)
I cannot decide which is the more beautiful: to contain him in my body, or to be contained in his body.
