One of my favorite “Catholic stories” is about the time the Southern writer Flannery O’Conner was taken by the poet Robert Lowell to a dinner gathering with the well-known author, Mary McCarthy, a proud “lapsed” Catholic.
O’Conner had referred to McCarthy as a “big intellectual,” and from 8 o’clock in the evening until after midnight, O’Conner did not say a word. And then, she recalled later, in the wee hours the conversation turned to the Eucharist. McCarthy said that as a young girl she thought of the Host as the Holy Ghost, that is, the most “portable” person of the Holy Trinity. She said now, however, she thought of it as a symbol, “and a pretty good one at that.” The shy, young, thoroughly Catholic Southerner’s response, recorded in her letters in the volume “The Habit of Being,” is remarkable: “I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of, but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
This is the time of the liturgical year when we’ve been hearing the beautiful discourses on the Eucharist in our Mass readings and subsequently homilies on the Eucharist, as well. Some are from preachers who “operate by the slide rule,” as Flannery called it, that is, the “Jansenist-Mechanical Catholic” for whom the Church is not so much the Body of Christ but “the poor man’s insurance system.” On the other hand, some of our priests, with eloquence and precision, explicate from the heart that which is next to impossible – that is, the beauty of our incarnate God truly and substantially present in the Blessed Sacrament.
It is not so much certainty about how and when transubstantiation actually occurs and what it means that makes the Eucharist so near and dear to us. The famed convert from Anglicanism, Cardinal John Henry Newman, was as passionate as any of our saints of old in searching for the truth, in his zeal for pinpoint accuracy in biblical explanations and theological definitions. But in the end, it wasn’t intellectual clarity that made him take that last step into full communion with the Church of Rome. I don’t know, but I would like to think it was more because the Eucharist and the Real Presence, which he had, in fact, believed in for many years, had become more and more the very center of his existence – the rest of his life expendable.
Our materialist world does not take kindly to claims of the miraculous. Flannery O’Conner observed that miracles were an outright embarrassment to the modern world. And yet we are called to be present as the bread and wine of the table become the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord, the “source and summit” of all we believe about the love and mercy and power of God, the loaves and fishes come alive in our hearts, manna in the wilderness of this world, the center of our existence, the rest of life expendable.
While the accidents of bread and wine remain the same chemically and visually, once we accept that the substance of that food of the altar becomes the Body and Blood of our Savior (although we cannot understand it fully), once we come to believe what really happens and the ramifications of that miracle in our lives, the need to prove our religiosity goes away and suddenly a yearning to be in front of the Blessed Sacrament sneaks in. The face of piety changes; the “I’m-more-Catholic-than-you-are” mentality is seen for the trifle it is. Nothing remains for show; we hunger and God is our only food, the Host not in the least like a symbol, but a beautifully stark reality with lightning in it that we find hard to define.
Long before he became Catholic, Cardinal Newman wrestled intellectually with how the invisible presence of Christ “touched the secret heart.” In the end, with great humility, he understood the limits of his own formidable mind compared to the infinite mind of God. In his “Apologia Pro Vita Sua” he responds to the common objection that the doctrine of transubstantiation is so difficult to believe: “For myself, I cannot indeed prove it, I cannot tell how it is; but I say, ‘Why should it not be? What’s to hinder it? What do I know of substance or matter? Just as much as the greatest philosophers, and that is nothing at all.”
So somehow, at some point, the substance of the Christ he had grown to love so dearly must have touched his secret heart with the force of belief. He just couldn’t keep from full communion. He said, “You must be patient, you must wait for the eye of the soul to be formed in you. Religious truth is reached, not by reasoning, but by an inward perception.” And it is this inward perception that informs so much of Flannery O’Connor’s writing.
So as the Host is raised high from the altar I say what older Catholics taught me; I say what the Apostle Thomas said: “My Lord and my God!” And as I return to my pew after receiving Communion, I say the ancient eastern Jesus Prayer, over and over: “Lord, Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.” I know I am not worthy that my God should come under my roof to sate my hunger and infiltrate me, but He does and there is some kind of inward perception that inexplicably touches my secret heart. And it is real. And He is real. In fact, I suppose the Eucharist is the most real thing I know. Because, after all, if it’s just a symbol, well, to hell with it.
Fred Gallagher is an author and editor-in-chief with Gastonia-based Good Will Publishers Inc.