It is easy for me to imagine that people today, both outside and within the Church, might have a perspective not too distant from the crowds to whom Jesus spoke in today’s Gospel. Jesus said, "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world." It’s not difficult to imagine the emergence of the crowd’s stunned question, “How can this man give us flesh to eat?”
Flesh?
It makes no sense. It is foolish indeed.
And yet, after having stepped away for an extended period of time from the Mass and the Eucharist, because of how wounded my heart had become as a result of the practices of some Church leaders, it is to the Eucharist that I have returned. I am finding Wisdom in the foolishness of the Eucharist.
I’ve been reading a lot about Dorothy Day lately. Through a book-study with the St. Bakhita Catholic Worker in Milwaukee, I joined others in taking a “deep-dive” into examining Dorothy, learning about her life and her faith; her commitment to peace, the poor, and the Eucharist; her integrity… and, her many contradictions, unfulfilled longings, and her discontent with structures of injustice. This was a woman who wrote in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, “I felt that the Church was the Church of the poor... but at the same time, I felt that it did not set its face against a social order which made so much charity in the present sense of the word necessary. I felt that charity was a word to choke over. Who wanted charity? And it was not just human pride but a strong sense of man's dignity and worth, and what was due to him in justice, that made me resent, rather than feel proud of so mighty a sum total of Catholic institutions” (150). Granted, Dorothy felt this way before she became aware of the Church’s encyclicals and social teaching. Even so, it seems to me that throughout her life Dorothy wanted the Church to be more present and more active in confronting the systems of injustice which were so readily apparent and abhorrent to her. Through it all, her love for the Eucharist, for Christ’s Presence in the world, was constant and she became a daily communicant.
Thomas Merton wrote to Dorothy in the 1960s during a time when many of the traditional positions of the Church were “very much under fire… from people whom I cannot dismiss as morally irresponsible.” Regarding his monastic vocation he wrote, “if I hold onto it, which I certainly do, it is no longer on the grounds that it is ‘best’ but on more existential grounds: ‘it may be absurd, I may not understand it, it may look like madness in the eyes of all these cats, but it happens to be what I am called to, and this is what I am going to do.’ (Dorothy Day: A Biography William D. Miller, 489).
Even though I continue to struggle with many of the ways that the hierarchical Church is showing up in our world today and sadly (really grievously) continues to wound people’s minds, bodies, and souls in so many ways (including my own), I have been inspired by Dorothy’s authentic and complicated witness to the Eucharist. I have decided to accept Wisdom’s invitation found today in Proverbs, “Let whoever is simple turn in here; To the one who lacks understanding, she says, Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed! Forsake foolishness that you may live; advance in the way of understanding." The Eucharist IS Christ’s presence and action in the world, in us.
Comments