A Tangible Presence: Thoughts on the Eucharist

If I hadn’t grown up immersed in Christian symbolism, I suspect that I would find the Eucharist both bizarre and deeply disturbing, perhaps even offensive. Even as accustomed as I am to the whole thing, the sheer strangeness of it still hits me at times. I wish that Jesus had come up with a different ritual for remembering him, I sometimes think. I’m not sure how much I care for this one. In John 6, Jesus graphically comments that “my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink” (v. 56), and links this eating and drinking to eternal life. The disciples complain that this is a difficult teaching (v. 60), and then many of them end up leaving him (v. 66). Honestly, I’m sympathetic. I don’t think that this would have won me over.

But on a week-to-week basis, I find that I struggle less with the weirdness of the ritual, and more with how mundane it actually is in practice. Maybe I’ve read too many exciting accounts in which the Eucharist worked wonders, but I find myself wanting it to be a mystical experience, to be somehow transcendent. I don’t think that it ever has been.

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The historical debates over about what exactly what is going on in the Eucharist have been intense. Are the elements literally being transformed into the body and blood of Christ (transubstantiation), or is the ritual meant to be symbolic? This question sparks strong opinions, and has divided religious traditions. But while I find the theological questions interesting, on a personal level, I find that the most helpful approach to understanding God’s presence in the Eucharist is to consider what it means for human beings to be present to one another.

Sometimes I think that the most valuable gift we can give each other is the simple willingness to sit with someone, to listen to their pain without dismissing it or trying to fix it. This isn’t an easy practice; it regularly requires tolerating awkwardness and discomfort and a certain sense of powerlessness. But when I look at the people who’ve made a real difference in my life, it’s not necessarily because they had amazing insights (though sometimes they did). It’s because they’ve hung in there with me.

I have thought a lot about the power of presence. I have especially thought about it when I have waited in emergency rooms, and people have come to wait with me. I have thought about it when I’ve been in the hospital, and people have made time to visit, to be there in that space with me. It is not hyperbole to say that the presence of others has even been a life-and-death matter for me during times when I have not been safe to be left alone. Presence is no small thing.

Once in a state of depression I was lying in bed doing nothing at all, overwhelmed by inertia. I am a slug, I thought to myself. And I am not going to talk to God, because (to quote the words of a Mormon hymn), I have not done any good in the world today, I have not helped anyone in need, and I have not done something more than dream of my mansions above. I was sure God was sighing exasperatedly. But then I had a powerful sense of God simply saying to me, “Let me come and sit with you.” No condemnation. No telling me to just pull it together. Just a willingness to be there.

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While I have not had amazing mystical experiences with the Eucharist, I have thought a lot about its physicality, and the power of that. So much of mental illness happens in a nebulous cognitive realm. How do you grapple with depression when it has no substance, when it will always slip right through your fingers? How do you know that it’s even there when you can’t see it? For a long time, I marked my skin with razor blades, in a desperate attempt to make the turmoil visible. To make it tangible.

My arms are still cross-crossed with white scars from all those years of cutting. I don’t think about them a lot these days, but sometimes I notice them. I don’t have a desire to remove them; they feel like a part of my personal history that is deeply interwoven with who I am now. And even after all this time, all these years of practicing the very difficult skill of believing that my experience and my feelings are real even if I don’t create physical evidence of them, if I’m honest, I still like the visibility of the marks, the fact that I can see them. Sometimes I still want to see them.

When we get to the Eucharist in a church service, I don’t always feel like I’m in the mood to participate. Sometimes I’m just feeling checked out and disengaged. Sometimes I am distracted. Sometimes I am angry at God and want to keep my distance. Sometimes I am avoiding God for other reasons. Regardless, I remind myself that participation in this ritual is a physical act, not an act of mental or emotional willpower. No matter what my brain is up to, I can walk up to the altar and implicitly say, I’m still in this, and be reminded palpably that God is still in it, too. That we have a claim on each other.

Perhaps the most absurdly terrifying and yet somehow undeniably true statement I have ever heard was that God loves all of you, even (and maybe especially) the parts you hate, and that you should bring all of that up to the altar. I don’t actually believe that God could truly love all the terrible parts of me, but sometimes I at least consider the idea. So as I walk up to the front, I try to not push down all the feelings and aspects of myself that I consider unacceptable, but rather be present as my whole self. I try to remember that God is not calling me to keep parts of who I am in the shadows.

I put one open hand on top of the other, and hold out my arms. If I look down, I will see the reminders of past injuries everywhere, angling in all directions, haphazardly crossing each other. Slowly I have come to believe that God does not recoil from those scars, that God can look at them unflinchingly, can see them clearly but also see beyond them. The priest places a wafer in my cupped hands, and I feel its physical presence on my skin. A tangible form of belief. A broken piece of bread to slip between the cracks of my resistance to being loved.

(cross-posted from The Hour Before Sunrise)