Real Presence: A Sleeping Dog(ma) Wakes

Buddhists talk about Presence as connecting us to all of life.  Catholic beliefs include one that contrarily separates us from other faiths – the belief that the bread and wine consecrated at Mass are really the body and blood of Christ.  This belief is the dogma that we call the “Real Presence”.   

I reflected during my weekly men’s Gospel conversation group that we can be guided toward better connection with all of life by looking at this dogma.  And since the group comes together to help us serve appropriately as leaders of our families, I found it calling us to “real presence” with our wives and children.

We are, in the churches that use the shared book that is a three-year cycle of Sunday Scripture readings, in the third week of looking at a problem that Jesus had with people recognizing him.  We call it “the Bread of Life Discourse.”  The men in power in the Jewish community are observing this “son of the carpenter” preaching about Scriptures and saying “who does this guy think he IS?”  And Jesus responds by showing them, and then telling them.  He feeds an incredibly large group of people, and then he says “I am the Bread of Life”.  As those men in power eventually find removing Jesus as their solution to his insubordination, he feeds his followers at one last supper with them.  But this time he says the same thing more clearly.  This time he says that the bread is his flesh, and that they should eat it.  And for the sake of clarity, he offers them wine, and says that it is his blood, and that they should drink it. 

As a Catholic kid, I have to say this raised two responses in me – mystery and revulsion.  I was always relieved to find the taste of wine and the texture of bread in communion, instead of whatever blood and flesh would taste and feel like.  But that aroused in me a kind of fearful skepticism, sensible but threatening – hell and all, after all.  Those feelings have never left me, and for most of my adult life I’ve let that sleeping dog-ma lie.   

So it was a moving experience to be in this group of men, most husbands and fathers, and find that it all made sense.  The drift of the Gospels these three weeks has been those in control refusing to see Jesus as who he was.  They judged him by his history, holding him as the son-of-a-carpenter.  Their restricting him to his historical identity was in such powerful contrast to his real impact on society that it led them to complicity in his death.  What a tragedy.  What a waste.

So when we began to reflect on this in our group, the first focus was on Jesus calling himself the “Bread of Life” and the way that followed the previous Sunday’s story of his feeding the multitude by blessing, breaking, and distributing the apparently inadequate few loaves and fishes, and more than satisfying the need.  Pretty soon one of the guys mentioned the dogma of “Real Presence” and how we Catholics need to treasure this belief and share its truth.  I’m always leery when we focus on what makes us different as Catholics, because I fear we put up walls.  But I found the group’s collective wisdom and grace letting this stone make ripples in our pond.  Someone mentioned how our judging the bread and wine by their appearance was like the Pharisees’ judging Jesus by his history.  And then someone else, a recent convert to Catholicism, said that if we want to get to the root of our difficulty in believing in Jesus or the Real Presence in the Mass, we could start with our believing in our wives and kids, believing that they are so much more than they appear to us. 

Life is simpler for me, easier to accept, when I can taste the wine and feel the texture of wheat at communion.  I can leave the mystery on its shelf and go on with whatever is my preoccupation or plan.  And I think it’s simpler, easier to manage, if I think I know my wife, know my kids, based on my perception of them and my sense of their history.  But just as the bread and wine are transformed in mystery, I know that the same is true of my wife.   Like the bread and wine and Jesus, she is so much more than she appears.  Everything she does is, if I’m open to see it, her human unfolding and her human giving and her human encounter.  Her making coffee in the morning is no less mysterious and meaningful than the ritual of the priest breathing “this is the cup of my blood…” into the chalice at my Catholic Mass.  That morning coffee ritual is part of a deep mystery of our life together, our having come together 43 years ago, and our dance through the doorways of our shared life path.  And it is part of her mysterious unfolding, from maiden to mother of babies to Nana and still somehow mother.

One of the guys talked about bringing communion to those in the hospital as an experience of “standing at the edge of a cliff and looking down into the darkness and depth and going ‘Whooooaaaahhhhh!’”  

I know that I often am afraid to really look into my wife’s eyes.  It’s easier to stand back from the edge, to think of her rituals as mere habits, to think I already know her.  But the Buddhists have something that completely agrees with Jesus, and with my wife. To be connected to life requires presence.  Real  Presence.