When I was teaching college courses there were plenty of times when I was caught off guard by students’ questions — where either I was surprised by the gaps in their knowledge or where they exposed some of my own (or sometimes both!) — but I still found myself uniquely humbled by the experience of teaching my second grader his first Communion preparation lessons.
Our two older kids had been in Catholic school for this sacramental prep, so I hadn’t done this before. It wasn’t that I didn’t know the “right” answers to Henry’s questions about the Real Presence or who could or could not take Communion, but I do try to be honest with my kids, and I wanted to explain these things in ways that were in line with church teaching while also still making sense to him. And I also wanted to remain faithful to what I truly believed (and I felt like 8 might be a little young for my own mantra when it comes to the Real Presence: “Lord I do believe, help my unbelief”).
Ultimately I (more or less) stuck to the parish-provided catechesis book, and we didn’t dwell too long on his “Wait, we’re drinking blood? I don’t want to drink blood” objections. It wasn’t necessarily my finest teaching display — I might have made a fleeting reference to substance versus accidents — and I’d love to see inside his head and see what, exactly, he now understands or believes about the Eucharist. But on the day of his first Communion, he was (mostly) just excited, and not simply because he got to wear a cool suit. He was happy to finally get to receive Communion and feel fully part of things.
But this whole experience has had me thinking (again) about what I believe and why. One of my favorite Flannery O’Connor anecdotes comes from her attendance at a literary cocktail party, where the guests were talking about what a wonderful symbol the Eucharist is, and O’Connor, ever the faithful Catholic, awkwardly blurted out, “Well, if it’s just a symbol, to hell with it!” Far be it from me to disagree with O’Connor, but even as someone who does believe in the Real Presence — or who at least desires to believe in it — I do still find it to be a rich image, even just on the symbolic level. Henry’s joy on his first Communion came from his feeling like he was now fully a member of our community, and not just watching from the pew, rather than from him really comprehending what it meant to be receiving the body and blood of Jesus for the first time.
What he can grasp at this point is something that struck me, powerfully, on the morning of his first Communion, which was also the day of Pope Francis’ funeral. As I saw the crowd shots of the hundreds of thousands of faithful gathered in mourning and in celebration of a life well lived, it occurred to me that Henry was soon going to be even more fully a part of this great mass of people, the body of Christ that is the church. And even more specifically and concretely, when we was walking up the aisle at our church, I had a flash of all of those mourners in Rome also processing up for Communion at the funeral, and I saw how he was connected to this truly global community, which has a special kind of home in Rome, in the Vatican, at St Peter’s.
O’Connor has another quote that I love — that “the writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet.” And while this is true of the writer, it is also true of our church. It really does unite the transcendent with the specific and the particular. And yes, this is most truly realized in the sacrament of the Eucharist, but it’s also true in the physical spaces of our churches and, (I think) most particularly and uniquely, in Rome. I’ve been lucky enough to be there on a few different occasions — I have been on those cobblestoned streets that Catholics have been walking for centuries, have stood in St. Peter’s Square where the funeral took place, have even participated in a Mass celebrated by Pope Francis inside St. Peter’s Basilica. There is a privilege to being Catholic and having this kind of historical continuity grounded in a particular place.
But it is equally true we don’t need to go to Rome to experience this type of timeless unity. There is another quote from a Catholic writer that resonates for me here: at the end of Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” his somewhat skeptical narrator watches a man come out of Mass on Ash Wednesday and muses to himself:
It is impossible to say why he is here.
Is it part and parcel of the complex business of coming up in the world? Or is it because he believes that God himself is present here at the corner of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants? Or is he here for both reasons: through some dim dazzling trick of grace, coming for the one and receiving the other as God’s own importunate bonus?It is impossible to say.
This is the essence of the faith for me — belief that grace is present in ways somewhat unknowable, but also bracingly specific. That the same experience of God can be had at the crossroads of Elysian Fields and Bons Enfants in New Orleans, and at the meeting of Via Rusticucci and Via della Conciliazione in Vatican City, and at the corner of Thompson and East William in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where Henry received his first Communion last weekend.
Time and place and eternity do meet there — in each of the churches found at these crossroads, and in the sacraments celebrated inside, and in the people who gather to worship together. In ways that we can feel but do not always understand — and sometimes in ways that we believe but don’t necessarily feel.
And, truthfully, I don’t believe this type of union is limited to the church itself. I think of Thomas Merton, having his mystical experience at another crossroads — the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville, Kentucky — where, in the middle of the shopping district, he looked around and felt like he saw the people around him as God sees them, “as they really are.” Merton wrote:
I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all those people, that they were mine and I theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness. … [but] there is no way of telling people that they are all walking around shining like the sun.
Here, too, is an example of time and place and eternity meeting. I’ve made the pilgrimage to this exact spot (Walnut has since been renamed Muhammad Ali Boulevard), and you’d be hard pressed to find a more thoroughly average middle-American urban street corner; it is kind of grimy and rundown, a stone’s throw from a Guy Fieri’s Smokehouse. It is not the sort of place we’d expect to see God at work, but that’s the beauty of the Spirit and the movement of grace: It is not bound by our expectations.
It is no accident that I find myself turning to O’Connor and Percy and Merton when trying to understand these mysteries of faith — because these writers, too, are part of my understanding of what it means to be part of the body of Christ. As Catholics we get to share in, and receive, the gifts of the Catholic imagination, which allows us to better understand the relationship between the individual, the community of believers and the presence of God.
So while I’m not sure I explained the Real Presence convincingly to Henry, I trust that he will, in the fullness of time, come to his own understanding of this mystery and feel a part of this tradition that ties us all together across space and time. He does, after all, love magic and mystery and stories, and I know that the church has a truly unmatched reservoir of all of these to share with him.
Top artwork: Peter Paul Rubens