eucharistic revival

Lord, how is it that you will manifest yourself to us, and not to the world?

A portion of the Church in the United States of America comes together now in Indianapolis. It’s an American Church gathering the size of which, I assume, can only be rivaled in recent decades by papal visits. This moment’s coming together is for the purpose of celebrating and reviving belief in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

The revival is necessary because the real transformation of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Jesus was once, at least in predominantly Christian regions, widespread, and now it is not. Now the average person, baptized or unbaptized, would think such a belief to be crazy.

Flesh looks like flesh. Blood looks like blood. Jesus looks like Jesus. Things can simultaneously be multiple different things; a dog is a dog, and it is a mammal, and it is a vertebrate. But a dog is not and cannot be a cat. It is not and cannot be a tree. Likewise, bread cannot, except maybe in a figurative and poetic way, be a human Body. So thinks the World.

But the Church wonderfully insists differently. It insists that something can lack the texture of flesh, the smell of flesh, the color of flesh, yet it can be flesh. It insists that something can, should you take naked, before-and-after snapshots of it, look physically the same as it once did, yet not be the same.

The Church wonderfully insists on the importance and the power of the transformation of the Eucharistic sacrament. Yet, I say, most of the members of our Church, including those who encourage belief in the transubstantiation of bread and wine, resist seeing and accepting, in the fullness of its glory, the other, greater transformation which is effected in the sacrament of Holy Communion.

This transformation is the dying away of the men and women at the Eucharistic table and their becoming, while still wearing the physical death mask of their old life, someone else. This is the transformation of each person at the table into the Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God.

The doctrine of this transformation, known traditionally as deification, is already present within the teaching of the Church. It is inscribed in our Church’s oldest writings. Yet state this doctrine plainly to a pious Catholic and watch how much he resists hearing it! See how much disgust (and fear?) arises when you begin to touch on this doctrine’s most obvious implications!

I am I. You are you. Jesus is Jesus. The distant can become near in Christ, but they don’t literally become one person. I can never become Jesus; you can never become Jesus. So say many Eucharistic adorers.

When evaluating a Christian’s level of education and preparation for Kingdom work, a good measure to go by, perhaps the best measure, is their progress in learning and understanding and accepting our Church’s truths of transformation, which are essential to the Lord’s plan to bring down His Kingdom from Heaven.

The doctrine of Jesus’ Real Presence in the Eucharist can be seen as a belief important for the child, one to be drilled in early and which provides a foundation for later learning.

The more solid meat, however, the more substantial Flesh and Blood of knowledge, the subject of study fitting for the mature man or woman, is her own transformation into Christ Jesus, the bringer of salvation to the World.

Do you embrace this belief, one which many believers in the One Lord would call the highest blasphemy? Do you,

being a man, make yourself God?

The World needs mature believers who will step into the field wielding the full power of the Son, not infants in pews who need Father to place food on their tongues for them. May the Spirit who descends on our Eucharist give the whole Church the full vision of the Lord’s glorious plan for us. May the Spirit who descends on our Eucharist give us the courage to embrace this vision and to follow Jesus into Himself and His death.

May belief in the Eucharistic transformation of mundane matter into the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ Jesus be revived and be deepened and, by undeniable displays of God’s power, be spread to every home, to every mind on this planet.