Intermission of Fragments II - On the Experience of the Eucharist

First my apologies. Although I made no commitments, I certainly gave you friends the expectation that this blog would be updated before this. This was my own sincere intention, but my recent massive upheaval has been attended by a lot of unexpected illness, making trips to local internet stations all-but-impossible till now.

Anyway, herewith a fragment regarding the Eucharist:


Recently in an Irish newspaper a letter appeared by a priest and psychotherapist. Within it, there was, for me at least, a single, most tantalising line:

"As a practicising psychoanalyst, I can tell you that the inner spiritual experience, for that is what happens as we take in the body and blood of Christ, is that something mysterious has just occurred spiritually."

And then unfortunately, the writer says nothing more on what the nature of that experience might be.

I find this unfortunate, because I find so very, very little in print as to what the quality of this EXPERIENCE of the Eucharist might be.

True, throughout the Christian tradition, we have a great deal of testimony as to what the Eucharist DOES, beginning with the words of Christ Jesus:

"For My flesh is true food, and My blood is true drink. He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him (John 6:56).

And then there is a great deal of testimony from the Church Fathers to the same effect.

Maximus the Confessor for example, says: "The Eucharist transforms the faithful into itself." That is, into the Body of Christ.

And St John Damascene writes: "The Bread of the Communion is not mere bread, but bread united with the Godhead."

For those Christians suspicious of ecclesial tradition, there is also the testimony of modern esoteric Christians. Though generally opposed to the Church, Rudolf Steiner for example, repeatedly emphasised the awesome nature of the transubtantiation of the bread and the wine.

And circa 1936, Valentin Tomberg wrote: "There is nothing in the physical world more holy - more healing in the deepest sense of that word - than the bread of the Communion Service."

But again, all of this speaks to what the Eucharist ***does*** - not how it is experienced.

Now we live in an era of psychotherapy and New Age pursuits, where spiritual and inner ***experience*** is addressed and expressed more than ever.

A great deal of the enormous appeal of the New Age movement, I believe, is that is engaged with the realm of the EXPERIENTIAL - rather than that of simply doctrine and belief.

And personally, I believe this New Age interest in experience, reflects the modern need of the human soul. That we have arrived at an epoch in human evolution, where this is now more necessary than ever.

This is not to negate the tremendous wealth and riches to be found in Christian tradition and doctrine. Regular readers will know I have little belief in the New Age tendency to throw out the tradition ...

Still, I feel that we Christians do need to speak more in terms of experience, in *addition* to doctrine.

Thus, I am sadly struck by how very little I see in print, about how we FEEL and SENSE the Holy Eucharist.

That single line from the psychotherapist-priest quoted above tantalises me, precisely because it speaks, again, to an "inner spiritual experience something mysterious has just occurred spiritually."

And such indications of the inner experience seem to me all too rare.

Tentatively then, I will simply try to voice my own experience.

What accompanies Holy Communion for me is a set of familiar and precious sensations, that are admittedly very hard to record.

Part of this difficulty lies in the fact that it is an experience, unlike any other that I have known outside of the Church.

If one has never tasted an apple, how to relate the sensation of "appleness"? We may say that the apple is sweet, we might describe a texture that crunches, but nothing we can say will really suffice to explain the true experience of the apple.

Something similar though far, far more profound might be said about Holy Communion.

Those who regularly receive it, or at least those who really pay sufficient attention to their experience, will know whereof I speak.

For those who do not, my words may seem next to useless.

Nonetheless, I will use such words as "wholesomeness" and "cleansing". I feel something very, very wholesome in receiving the Eucharist - wholesome in the most beautiful sense of that word.

And I feel something cleansing me and helping to keep my soul clean from darkness.

I also feel an element of union - a sense that I am joining or rejoining something far larger tham myself, something very, very rich.

And the sense of joining or rejoining belongs to one of the greatest riches of my life.

I go to Holy Communion as often as I can. Recently I nevertheless asked myself WHY I go as often as I do.

Clearly, all of the above came before my soul. Simply the sheer depth of joy and richness and meaning, I receive in participating in the Mass.

But something else came as well.

I said to myself: "I go to Mass, because it HUMANISES me".

What is this sense that I am humanised by the Mass? Is it simply a structure of belief, inasmuch as I believe that I have taken in a holy substance, or I believe that Christ is now abiding in me?

For me, it is much more than that.

As I observe my spiritual path over the years, I feel that, by the Grace of God, I become a more feeling, more conscientious, more humane and HUMAN being.

And as I look at this trajectory of grace, I cannot escape the deeply held sense, that trajectory is directly related to regularly receiving the grace of Holy Communion. Holy Communion IS Holy Communion. It is Communion with that which makes me ever more human ...

For me, this is not mere belief based on doctrine. It is a deeply felt conviction that I cannot shake ...


Here ends this fragment. So, so much more I want to say in time about the Eucharist in not only its individual, but also social and even political dimensions.

But this must wait.

At the moment, as I sit in an internet cafe in Southern Spain, I am still ill. And it is impossible for me to say when fragments at least, will start to reappear. I hope it will not be so long this time. But again, I cannot say.

Au Revoir, my friends,

Roger