Many
years ago my schoolmate Paddy was engaged to marry Kay when she was
discovered to have cancer and to have only about a one -year life
expectancy. She told him that he could call it all off. He replied
that if he had loved her in good health he would love her in bad,
and the wedding went on as scheduled. Sixteen sickness filled years
and four children later, I was visiting when Kay entered her last
illness. During my visits to her I was struck by her lack of concern
about herself. Her only thought was for the happiness and welfare
of her husband and children when she was gone. One Thursday night
I said Mass in her hospital room with her husband and children looking
across at me from the other side of her bed. When I held up the bread
of the Eucharist and said "This is my body which is given for
you," it was her emaciated body that I saw in front of me. She
died the next day but she left me with a new understanding of Corpus
Christi, the body of Christ, the feast we celebrate today.
The
night before Jesus died he took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave
it to his disciples. I began to understand more what happened to Jesus,
and what he was doing for us and telling us, when I saw what happened
to Kay. She had been taken and blessed. She had been taken into life
by God and into marriage by Paddy. Then she was broken, but the more
she was broken the more her nobility and beauty appeared. Eventually,
she was given over to death. No, she gave herself over for her family,
for others.
This
too is what Jesus did. He himself was taken from among his people.
He was called by God in his conception and blessed to be the Messiah,
the son of God. But this blessing did not exempt him from what is
human. Rather, it immersed him in it all the more. He enjoyed and
suffered the whole gamut of human emotions. His joy was real at meeting
his friends. His sorrow was equally real when he was betrayed. He
was given over for us by Judas, by his apostles, by the people, and
by the Father. But he rose from it all and when asked to authenticate
himself all he did was show his human wounds.
The
Corpus Christi can never be seen as remote from human woundedness.
When we bring our own woundedness, like the woundedness of Kay, into
the presence of Christ we have Eucharist. Unfortunately many people
see religion, and particularly prayer, as a way of escaping woundedness
and pain. For Jesus pain was a reality to be faced and he faced it
in his passion. He asked us to celebrate Eucharist, "Do this
in memory of me." to remember him as the one who went through
suffering to glory.
Meditation is a Eucharistic way of prayer in the sense that it is
a way of sitting before God in thanksgiving and in acceptance. As
one is present to the prayer word, one is present totally to God's
will. One is present and available to be taken, blessed, broken and
given by the Lord, at the time and in the manner that he alone decides.
