OF SEVERAL MINDS.

THE EUCHARIST

What does it do?

Coming home from Mass today I realize that the more I go, the more I want to go, but the less I fully understand what I'm doing. Or rather what we the church are doing. Celebrating the eucharistic liturgy seems essential to the Christian life while remaining in part a mystery.

Mystery can be defined most aptly as "infinite intelligibility"; thus those who worship God as Truth do well to push further and further down the path of knowledge. As I have been discovering, there is a huge body of liturgical theology devoted to the Paschal mystery to be perused when faith seeks understanding.

Some contemporary questions in church practice add energy to the quest. Why do so many Catholics, especially young Catholics, not attend Mass regularly? Gallup polls find that 70 percent of the Catholics surveyed think "being a good Catholic is not dependent on going to Mass every Sunday." Focus groups report that many Catholics say that at Mass "no power/spirituality/ awe is evident." After all, goes one refrain, "I meet God elsewhere, too."

Well, of course, most assuredly. God is always about in the quotidian. Catholics who say "I have learned more about the love of God through twelve-step programs than I have ever found in the church," demonstrate that they have assimilated much of the gospel they heard proclaimed at church. They recognize the good news that God is Love and enables conversion, forgiveness, liberation, and a transformation of life-one day at a time. That "Higher Power" relied upon in the first step of Alcoholics Anonymous is also known as the Holy Spirit.

But the church seems to have failed to convey to many of its members the real presence of Christ and the Spirit in the Sunday eucharistic celebration. The manifold ways that Christ is present at Mass must be made clear to tomorrow's Catholics or the church won't survive. Since Christ promises that he will be present when two or more are gathered together in his name, we can encounter Christ in the gathered assembly, as well as within each worshiper.

Christ who is the Word of God also meets us in the Scriptures and in their exposition. (No matter how bad the homilist is, he can't ruin the readings.) The person of the priest or presider also manifests the presence of Christ. Then we come into the presence of Christ in the eucharistic rite, drinking the saving cup and eating the life-giving bread, partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ.

Faced with this most intimate act of union, this dimension of the mystery that is "real par excellence," I find that my powers of comprehension falter. "Lord, I believe, help my unbelief," cries the father of the epilectic boy begging Jesus to cure his son. I need help in understanding how the historical body of Jesus relates to his resurrected body, to the sacramental body, and to the ecclesial body of the church.

Of course, I readily admit that as a citizen of the secular scientific world, I also don't really know what "matter" is, or for that matter, how one unique human "body" develops and progresses through space/time. The uncertainties of our scientific, philosophical, and metaphysical world views contribute to our theological questioning.

In the humanities, moreover, scholars advocate complex new theories of signs and symbols, and expound on the uses of language; these ideas also have bearing on our understandings of sacramental and symbolic reality. A symbol supposedly embodies both presence and absence, and I need help understanding how this applies to the sacraments. Will I live long enough to see how the next millennium's eucharistic theologians work out new syntheses of knowledge? Much more immediately, I hope I see a beginning on the monumental task of adult catechetical instruction.

Meanwhile, back in the parish, I continue to be drawn into the power of the eucharistic mystery to effect transformations. This rich ritual of simultaneously giving and receiving works to propel me, to impel me to change my life. Ritual, or "the choreography of the soul," makes its demand while giving comfort and joy. Surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, we enter into a new dimension of reality and confirm its meaning for one another.

What we imagine, attend to, and imitate we become. In the eucharistic celebration, Christians engage in a high form of play that incorporates us into the divine life. We join together with the angels and the saints in offering thanks and praise to God. We sing God's words in the psalms and responses. At the ritual meal we take the part of Christ's disciples. Then we imitate Christ himself in offering each other peace, and praying the Lord's Prayer.

A thought. Priests and the servers wear vestments as signs of their roles in the drama. Maybe the rest of us in the assembly would do well to don vestments too, our thanks and praise garments-much like the gowns worn by Oxford scholars to signal their role as seekers after wisdom.

Fundamentally, I find that the liturgy engenders and inspires the desire to love God and neighbor. The assurance of Christ's love casts out fear and moves the heart. Here's where visual beauty, music, gesture, metaphor, silence, symbols, and the experience of joy become all-important. Joy energizes, heals, and comforts. Joyful hope and desire govern attention. When our hearts burn within us we believe in heaven. After "peak experiences" of transfiguration we can trudge back down the mountain and persevere in God's work. As Augustine writes of the great Sacrament, Christ calls out to us: "Grow and you shall feed on me. But you shall not change me into your own substance, as you do with the food of your body. Instead, you shall be changed into me." n