“I Received the Living God”

(7/4/23)

[“I received the living God, and my heart is full of joy. / I received the living God, and my heart is full of joy. / He has said: I am the Bread / Kneaded long to give you life; / You who will partake of me / Need not ever fear to die” (from R. Proulx, Worship, 735).]

O Lover,

The Mass at the Basilica last Sunday included our singing Proulx’s “I Received the Living God” as the communion hymn. That piece surfaces fairly frequently in that setting insofar as it clearly references the Eucharist, “source and summit” of Roman Catholic liturgy and life.

I first encountered the notion of eucharistically consuming You, O Lover, while a TA in 1969 at the University of Iowa teaching Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory. He has the narrator say this about the whiskey priest: “. . . it was from him [that] they took God—in their mouths.” I still recall my astonishment, including elements first of repulsion and, later, also attraction, upon reading those words. Thus upon becoming Roman Catholic more than two decades later I identified Your Real Presence in the Eucharist as one of my principal motivations and hungers. 

Nevertheless, across the more than three decades since that transition I would gradually become aware that magisterial teaching regarding that Presence, the doctrine of transubstantiation, simply was not reaching me. Aquinas’s use of Aristotle and the substance/accident argument seemed like a rather lame rational attempt to decipher the Mystérium of You. Furthermore, it rendered the sacrament vulnerable to dismissal as flirtation with magic. In addition, the doctrine seemed to focus on a specific place (alter) and time (the Mass) to the neglect of that everywhere and always true about You. Yet, O Lover, amid this decaying half-life of the doctrine of transubstantiation which left me largely unreached and rarely awed, I continued to experience the gravity-like allure of the Eucharist and Your Real Presence, its reach now increasingly ubiquitous rather than Mass- and alter-tethered. 

So what was happening on Sunday as my device-paced heart mounted up within me to the organ’s first chords of “I Received the Living God”? More broadly, what had been repeatedly seizing my attention even as 13th C Thomistic categories were found wanting and I unreached? A current aphorism, “you become what you eat,” may be helpful. Particularly among the low country Beguines and Rhineland mystics of the Renaissance the hints and glimpses of deification or theósis (“engoddedness”) in the Christian Scriptures were explored and allowed to flower even as the Augustinian firewall between You as Creator and us as creatures was de-absolutized. In these mystics’s visions You, O Lover, are ever transformingly drawing us humans, indeed the entire cosmos, into Yourself in a process the Télos of which is Your “all in All” (I Cor 15:28). The evidence of Your bent toward irrevocable cosmo-tabernacling and unítas, convergence and consolidation, is as old and as broad as the universe itself. Each time I consume You I both reiterate and have expanded my “yes!” to Your Project of drawing all persons and all things into a unity in Your Christ (Eph:10); each time both my body and spirit are participating in this Your M.O. ever and everywhere operative; each time I am acting upon a thirst for which eternity itself is too brief a duration for its complete slaking.

What I experienced in our collective singing of “I Received the Living God” last Sunday was that as my mouth received You with the bread’s constituents beginning to disperse into and become incorporated into my body, cells, and molecules, so, in some sense, my awareness of Your cosmic Unítas Project, Your Oneness with all of Your finite beloveds, was being heightened, and “my heart [was] full of joy.” I became yet more persuaded that Your Real Presence has ever encompassed the entire creation which You first began to bring forth as Your Love-child. Yes, when I receive You in my mouth I am participating in heaven and earth being full of Your Real Presence, Your ineffable glory.