ARTICLE

Among my first memories, from the time when I was only three or four, is the memory of how my mother helped me realize that Jesus is with us in the Eucharist.

Teaching About the Eucharist

My mother use to take me for walks, but she did not walk past churches. Churches were for going into. She took me in, guided me all the way to the communion rail, and knelt to pray.

I saw the earnestness with which her lips moved quietly, and felt the attention with which she listened to one I certainly could not see nor hear. Her whole heart was in her prayer. Obviously she was talking to someone important, though all I could see was the gold tabernacle and the flickering light near it.

All this fascinated me, but not for long. After a short time, I had had enough. I pulled on her skirt. "Time to go." She seemed not even to hear me. So I said the same thing over and over, my voice gradually getting louder and louder.

Finally we left. As we left, my mother told me: "That is where Jesus is." From the time I was a tiny infant, I am sure, before I understood anything, and through times when my understanding was most vague, she had spoken to me of Jesus, our Savior and our God.

Now if my mother said Jesus was right here (and she was very wise), and if Jesus said so himself: well, that was it. Catholic faith in the Eucharist had been proclaimed to me, and I knew it was true.

Later, when I did graduate work in psychology, I could spell out reasons why a child can feel sure of even the most astonishing things said by a parent. But when in theology I studied the nature and causes of faith I could see why even as a child my faith was not just a subjective "feeling sure," that might just disappear when more sophisticated wondering about the world began.

In this wonderful and fearful world, in which God really dwells, someone who had divine faith had spoken a truth of faith to a very small child. But it was a child who, in Baptism, had received the great gift of faith. Even then, without my knowing it, the Lord had given my small mind a preparedness to grasp as true the good things he wanted me to know. Now I knew one of the best things.

Reasons for Believing

Clearly I had good reasons for believing, though later I came to see more and more reasons. I could see that everyone - my parents, my big brothers and sisters, all the strange crowds that filled out church on Sunday - had known the wonderful secret I had learned, and believed it too. Anyone could see how sure they were, especially when the Eucharist was held up before them at the altar. Most of them were saying quietly, "My Lord and my God," the very words my mother told me to say.

For it made sense of so much. If God made us, and all things, he had to stick with us in this wonderful and dangerous world. Of course, like all little boys, I loved this strange world. But already I had learned how fragile it is: when our dog died; when I got a bad ear ache, and could not understand it; when a great uncle died. In this puzzling world, we all needed to know just where the Lord is. God is everywhere, but Jesus, God who became our brother, and bears divinity with human approachability, is right here.

The Logic of Faith

Christian faith is intelligent, but is also a free gift of God to our freedom. Some things that faith teaches can be known also by intelligent reflection by those who have the leisure and ability to think deeply. But the central mysteries of faith could not be known by us at all unless God were our friend and teacher, and revealed these saving truths.

We are guided toward faith by signs God graciously gives us. These signs do not simply prove that the mysteries of faith are true, for faith is not the end of a long argument: it is the beginning of a new life. It is believing God himself.

Jesus gave the apostles signs that he really was what he gradually taught them he was: the eternal Son of God. He led them toward faith by his miracles, by his gentle wisdom ("No one has ever spoken as this man speaks!" John 7:46), by his astonishing goodness. All these led them to take seriously the word that Jesus was indeed what the tongue fears to say: my very God. But how could I dare believe something so astonishing?

When St. Peter does come to full faith in Jesus, and declares that Jesus is indeed the Messiah and the Son of the living God, Christ explained to him how his faith came to be. It was not flesh and blood that made things sure, not calculation from signs and reasons alone. It was a gift. "My Father in heaven" has given you this faith (Matt. 17:16). Your faith is built on God, not on mere human reasoning. You might forget reasons, and clever people can confuse calculations, but faith is to be grasped in peace, and endure until we see God face to face. God wanted you to come thoughtfully, intelligently to faith: but God's grace transforms the water of human thinking into the wine of divine faith, into a sharing in God's own knowledge. Hence one who believes God believes with ease, and certainty (DS 3010), and can build a whole life securely on this faith.

Gospel Faith in the Eucharist

The Gospel tells us of how the apostles came to believe Christ's teaching on the Eucharist. Bread was to become his body. The Eucharist would make us remember, and have in our midst the love of his holy cross.

Those disciples whose faith in Jesus himself was not strong simply refused to believe. "This is a hard saying" (John 6:60). But they had good reasons to believe: everything Jesus had said and done, all they had experienced to lead them to acknowledge that he is the Lord who can do all things, and is truth itself, were reasons to believe. They reflected not on Jesus, but on the astonishing nature of what he had said, and did not believe. Christ had made it clear that not believing him, when one has good reasons to believe, and has grace available to believe most surely, is to abandon Jesus. "Do you also want to go away?" (John 6:67), Christ asked the apostles. St. Peter's answer echoes in every believing heart. "Lord, to whom would we go? You have the words of everlasting life, and we have come to believe and to know that you are the Christ, the Son of the living God" (John 6: 68-69).

Complexity and Simplicity

When Thomas Aquinas speaks of the Eucharist, he shows how much loving God with the whole mind requires. He seeks to answer every difficulty people might have. He seeks to answer all those who would say that what Jesus said of the Eucharist is impossible. He is well aware that intelligence can be entirely at home with the Eucharist, realizes how fitting and good a gift it is, and knows how splendid are the reasons one can have for believing the word of Christ. But believing is not demonstrating by argument. It is saying yes to a friend who has made faith in himself more than possible, and has turned all our reasoning into something better. Faith is something more sure than arguments, something deep in the depths of the person. We can build all our lives on faith.

St. Thomas knew very well the complexity of arguments that lead to faith or seek to defend it. But he also tasted the great simplicity and joy of faith. In a poem he wrote to celebrate the Eucharist that was the center of his life he points to the chief reason why the wisest of philosophers (or the least educated of Christ's faithful) accept the Eucharist with joy and ease: "I believe whatever the Son of God has said."

The Mystery of Faith

Now that I am a priest, and say Mass for crowds of people, I see how calm and deep is the faith of the great numbers who crowd into church every Sunday.

When I raise the host that has become the body of Jesus our Savior, I realize that they are adoring him as willingly as I do. When I raise the chalice that holds his precious blood, which was shed to save the whole world from all its most bitter sorrows, their faith supports my own. Then it is a great joy to cry out: "Let us proclaim the mystery of faith!" This faith is not a burden: it lifts us up. In a skeptical world it is astonishing that so many have so peaceful a faith in so sublime a mystery.

Ease in Believing

Unfortunately, many of our Catholic people over the last decades have not been taught the clear doctrine of the Eucharist. They have not been taught that bread becomes the body of the Lord, and wine his saving blood. They are not taught that in the Eucharist we are present to his saving cross, the sacrifice that heals all our lives. The failure to teach faith fully leads to failures in faith, and recent polls suggest that many Catholics are losing their faith in the Eucharist. This is too bitter a loss.

St. Thomas points out that, though the Eucharist is a towering mystery, it is not a matter of deep difficulty for one who believes in the God who loves us, who is truth itself, and who can do all things. For one who believes in the Father and in Jesus, a gift like this fits comfortably into the mind as well as into the heart.

Wherever the Eucharist is taught, with strong faith, to one who has been given in Baptism the gift of faith, the hearer knows that it is all true. Even little children know it, and great scholars, and scientists, and ordinary people, battered by the world, and needing the Lord's presence. Only those who do not walk in the path of faith find the teachings of Catholic faith about the Eucharist too hard a saying for the wonderful people of God.

A charter member of the Fellowship of Catholic Scholars, and until recently rector of Holy Apostles Seminary in Cromwell, CT, Fathor Lawlor is now a full time advisor to Bishop Donald Wuerl of Pittsburgh.