Source and Summit
O Lover,
In the Lenten seasons of this my November I am being shown that my most important “giving up” is not regarding this or that, but reductionist depictions of You. At no time is the urgency of such surrender as great as when we are entering the narthex of the Tríduum. Ever in Your Presence, I explore one such “pious reduction” in this prayer.
You, O Lover, have Self-disclosed in such a manner as to compel me to be an incarnationalist: above all else, I experience You as Immánuel (“[You] with us” [Mt 1:23]), The Tabernacler (Jn 1:14; Apoc 21:3), embodied in the Christ and thus shown to be manifested throughout Your beloved cosmos. The Advent/Nativity/Epiphany liturgical sequence is the celebration, the Voilá!, of that seismic and transformative Self-revealing; the Tríduum, flanked as it is by Lent and Mystagógia, is both recapitulation and showcase of how Your cosmic omni-penetration assumes form throughout the finitisphere, not least amid the myriad expressions of “death.” Stated musically, Your Solidarity Masterstroke in the birth of the Christ is the concretion of Your theme of inexhaustible Love, the Paschal Mystery the all-encompassing orchestral elaboration upon that theme.
So what is the representation of You which needs to receive less rather than more attention in this week of the Tríduum? In brief, sacrificial eucharistic devotion as the center of Your Divine Life among us. And why my uneasiness regarding this unduly elevated emphasis? Sacrifice-infused eucharistic piety tends to focus more on what transpires on the alter than throughout Your beloved world; it tends to presume that (Aristotle-informed) transubstantiation is the sole meaning of Your Real Presence; its repeated expiatory overtones in the Mass do not correlate well for many with who You as Lover are experienced to be via the Christ; its more extreme expressions can segue into flirtation with magical cultus; its aura is often restorationist, more at home in Trent than Vatican II. An example of some of the above tendencies can be seen in the promotional material for the current National Eucharistic Revival promoted by the U. S. Conference of Catholic Bishops where a particular view of, and devotion to, what transpires on the alter is set forth as central to combating threats to traditional Catholicism.
So what is the alternative to such alter absorption? Most basically, the Eucharist, all of its richness notwithstanding, is more arrow pointing toward than it is destination at which to arrive. And to what does this eucharistic arrow point? It points to You, O Lover: Nurturer, Incarnater, Epiphanizer, Transformer, Resurrecter, Deifier, Reality Itself, Source and Summit. All of this, and infinitely more, is brought together in the narrative of Holy Week, a consolidation referred to repeatedly in Vatican II as the “Paschal Mystery.” In its deference to You Yourself the Eucharist is thus not unlike the Christ who said, “Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone” (Mk 10:18). When the author of the Epistle to the Ephesians writes of Your Mystérion of all creation being drawn into a headship in the crucified and risen Christ, he is connoting the radical and cosmic scale of that Paschal Mystery. The first and last venue of “transubstantiation” is thus not so much the alter as it is the unfolding of Your will “on earth as it is in heaven” (Mt 6:10), Your bringing forth of “a new heaven and a new earth” (Apoc 21:1). The locus of Your Real Presence, sometimes via the Eucharist and sometimes otherwise, is everywhere.
While the Eucharist embodies for us both Your irrevocable entanglement in our messy finitude and the splendored singularity of Your cosmic dream, the core of our faith is that You are transformingly drawing into Yourself all things, death not excepted, and that therefore, in the words of Julian of Norwich, “all shall be well.” In our now imminent trek into the Tríduum, I embrace yet a bit more, O Lover, this biggest possible picture. In a word: Tu Sólus.
