To Be Hungry
A group of Christians found themselves in a South
American prison as Easter Sunday approached. They
were determined to celebrate Holy Communion despite
the total prohibition of any such thing in prison. By previous
agreement, on Easter morning a large group of their fellow
prisoners stood to form a human wall around the secret
gathering of the Christians. The conversation of the larger
group produced an “acoustic wall” behind which the words
of celebration and life could be proclaimed. The participants
meditated on the sacrifice of Christ out of their own experience
of being pursued, arrested, tortured, falsely accused, and even
condemned to death. They prayed for all their colleagues,
friends, families….their people in captivity or on the run: for
those about to die. Since they had no possible way of securing
bread and wine, the pastor (himself a prisoner) simply reached
out his own “empty” hand each time to the “empty” hand of each
prisoner-communicant, pronouncing the Eucharistic words:
“Take, eat, this is my body broken for you,” and “This cup is the
new covenant in my blood.”
The Feast of Life: A Theological Reflection on the Theme
“Jesus Christ—the Life of the World,” Canon John Poulton,
World Council of Churches, 1982, p.34-35.
Though this experience is of an ecumenical community, it reveals the high regard the Eucharist has in many mainline Christian denominations. It could also be held in striking contrast to the way the Eucharist is perceived among many contemporary Catholics.
That group of Christians in the South American prison in the late seventies believed in what we Catholics call the “real presence” of Christ in the community celebration of the Eucharist. For them the sacrament of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ was present to them in a way that we can only imagine. Their belief in the real presence was both deeply personal and profoundly communal. For them, their “empty” hands held more than a sacrament, a “sacred sign;” their hands held the real presence. In their suffering, they consciously shared with the suffering of the Christ, which gave them the hope they needed to go on.
It is no secret that as many as seventy percent of Catholics in this country, and probably throughout the first world, regularly absent themselves from the Sunday Eucharist. Analysts offer the loss of faith in the institution as one of the major reason for this statistic. To be sure, we’re all tired of the scandals, since they have managed to drain the hierarchy of their credibility and have damaged the faith even of those who continue to be active. At the same time, it would be futile to deny the institution’s seeming lack of compassion for the messiness of the human condition as a major factor driving people away. But even those issues might be masking a deeper reason.
Though clearly anecdotal, there is sufficient evidence to indicate that our contemporary culture has lulled us away from the power of the Eucharist we see in the story of those political prisoners. On the one hand, too many of us have become so involved in “life” that we no longer have time to connect with religious rituals. At the same time, like addicts who cannot acknowledge that they are powerless over their addiction, we have allowed ourselves to be tricked into believing we can do it all, that we don’t need the “crutch of organized religion” to get us through life. That may be at the heart of the problem: we have become too self-sufficient to warrant dependency on anything.
What we need is to recapture the spirit of that group of prisoners. Clearly we need to be hungry again. That’s the reason a friend once told me he was leaving the church. For him the routine was short-circuiting the meaning of the ritual. His personal story was not connecting with what was happening at the weekly celebration. Or perhaps the weekly celebration was not connecting with his lived experience! It happens. Even those of us who regularly come to this table often feel that way. This realization should not be denied; it should be embraced. Ironically, it’s what gives us a reason to come to the table. What those prisoners realized, without bread or wine, was that they needed to be one with the Eucharist. And so they shared Eucharist. Their “empty” hands extended to one another said it all.
We sometimes think that we have to do this thing we do each Sunday or we will go to hell – or if we don’t, our adult children and grandchildren will go to hell! It’s not about that. It’s about our hunger. It’s about the fear we have of financial future, about our health, about our jobs, about a shaky relationship. Like those prisoners it’s about the real presence of Christ in the midst of the messiness of our humanity, giving us the hope to go on. The ritual of the Eucharist is the powerful sacrament of that reality.
But first we have to admit not that we are unworthy, but rather that we are hungry. In the bread and the wine transformed into the Body and Blood of the Christ we embrace the one who is all. In our communion we bind ourselves together so that we can offer ourselves to one another. Our own hunger becomes the source of nourishment for others. Just as Christ’s suffering redeemed us, so will ours be, when we share ourselves – not with hands empty, but overflowing with the real presence.
