Tuesday, August 7, 2018

People don't study the metaphysics of the transubstantiation of the Eucharist as much as they used to

From Sunday August 5, 2018 sermon in Covington, Kentucky:










[Finishing the gospel reading John 6:24-35:]

"Jesus said to them, 'I am the Bread of Life.  Whoever comes to Me, will never hunger. And whoever believes in Me will never thirst."  The Gospel of the Lord.

One of the things I think is perhaps most sad about religious education today is, especially in the Catholic Church is that we don't spend as much time talking about philosophy as we used to.  And I know that in a lot of ways I'm kind of a professional nerd. I've been in college for basically a decade, now. But, uhm, I think that it's important that  we be able to talk about and understand when philosophy is present.  Especially metaphysics which is kind of the king of all philosophy.  Metaphysics, very simply put, is just the studying of being as being. So it's the study of what a thing is at its very center.  And we see this and its important because it's kind of a primitive theology. It's all the things theology can say without [ Divine ] revelation, that's essentially what metaphysics becomes.   But we see this kind of metaphysics, this study of what things are and what being is littered throughout all of Scriptures.  For example in the Old Testament, we hear that Yahweh is 'I Am Who Am' [   ] And when He says, 'I Am Who Am' what is He talking about? He's talking about His very being.  What makes Him who He is.  And this is very important because in the Eucharistic doctrines we see another set of  important metaphysical ideas.  Ideas related to the very being of something.  The heart of the Eucharistic doctrine is that bread and whine become body and blood.  Their very being changes.  But associated with that is another idea I want to talk about today and that's the idea of what is love?  What does it mean to be in love?  There's sort of metaphysics latent in that, too.  There's metaphysics hidden in the idea of being in love.





And so what does it mean to love? So when a man or a person loves, his being is now for another. This is a gospel truth that we all know.  That the lover, the person who is loving, lives, literally, in the person that he loves.  He becomes a part of that person. This is the idea that we see expressed in the ideas of marriage, the theology of marriage.  That two become one.  That the bride and the groom become one flesh that they become person that their beings, their very selves are mutually dwelling within each other.  And this is the same idea that we see in the doctrine of the Holy Trinity in eternity and forever, the Three Persons of the Trinity  are dwelling, are together in each other, they are all one being, together and it's an eternal explosion of love amongst the three of them.   And its in our ideas of salvation that we as human beings sort of become one with that [Trinity] we are able to participate in this eternal explosion of love this eternal self giving of the Persons of the Trinity, we become a part of that.  We giver ourselves to our spouse, or we give ourselves to the Church, or we give ourselves to Christ in a religious order. But our culture holds out an opposite view of love.  For our culture it seems, love is possession. Love is taking something onto myself.  So marriage becomes not a total self gift of one another, it becomes now "she is my wife" or "he's my husband".  And it becomes a constant struggle for supremacy in a relationship that shouldn't be about power.  It's about mutual self gift. It's about total love and dedication. So now there's all this unhappiness...








People experience a wanting, a sort of hole in ourselves.  Something that longs to be filled, something that needs to be filled.  And so we try and fill it with different things, whether it be material riches or taking on another person in marriage [I presume he means divorce and remarriage versus bigamy ] but we don't actually fill it.  We're only making it worse. We only become more and more aware of how needy we are in that sense when we take things on that don't fulfill us. When we become immensely wealthy we buy that thing we always wanted  and it makes us happy for a time but it's not the eternal happiness that we're truly looking for.  But then in the Eucharist we see the model of this what true love is supposed to be about.  And the doctrine of the Eucharist we say that the bread and wine at the altar become the being of Christ, Himself.  It becomes the body, blood, soul and divinity, it becomes the totality of our Saviour.  There's not anything in the Eucharist that is missing from the very person that was walking on this earth 2000 years ago.  He is completely and totally in that sacrament.  All of that is there, present.  And that is a great metaphysical truth, it's a truth about the being  of the Eucharist that it is Christ himself, it is our Lord and Saviour in the Eucharist. But to go even beyond that, we said that love is to give oneself totally to another, to give one's being entirely to another, to live in the being of another person.  And what is the reception of the Eucharist except this very act? We receive the Eucharist and Christ becomes a part of us. He enters into our very being.  We chew and we consume Him and whatever processes of our body are, that Eucharist becomes a part of us.  It becomes a very part of our being.  And so Christ has wonderfully manifested the doctrine of love to us. He's given Himself totally in love to us through the Eucharist, through our reception of it.  And the question then becomes for us, are we giving ourselves entirely to the Eucharist? Because love has to be somewhat mutual, it's the total self gift of one to another.  And so when we receive the Eucharist selfishly or unworthily, we're not able to give ourselves totally.  The idea behind not being in a state of grace when we receive communion is that there's a wall....












...there's a wall, there's a blockade that prevents the total self gift of one to another and that's what happens with mortal sin, we can't give ourselves totally in the Eucharist.  So the question[s] I want us all to ponder, the idea I want us to contemplate this week is: "Are we giving ourselves totally? Are we truly in love? Are we able to give ourselves, our very being to God and the Eucharist? Are we receiving it not worthily in the sense of mortal or not mortal sin but are we receiving it in the sense - am I truly giving myself or am I withholding something back when I receive the Eucharist?"  Because that's the question we truly have to ask ourselves. If we want to be happy as Christians, as Catholics, if we want to be  successful as Christians and Catholics, if we want to attain Heaven, then we have to be able to enter into the Eucharist and give ourselves totally, ourselves freely and completely  to Christ in the Eucharist, to our Saviour on the cross.   And so as we begin to enter that part of the mass where we see father consecrate the host, let us ask God for the courage and the grace to be able to give ourselves totally, because it's not easy. Are beings are very fragile and weak and we want to give but we always kind of hold back. Let's ask for the courage to be able to give ourselves entirely. Let us ask to love God totally in the Eucharist today at mass and for the rest of the week.











Posted by adagioforstrings at 7:53:00 PM
Labels: , , ,

No comments :

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments ( Atom )