The Real Presence
O Lover,
Amid the silence of morning prayer I recently found myself unusually at rest in Your Presence. In that brief interval I was not thinking or petitioning, yearning or striving, but simply at peace, in an equilibrium both loving and ineffable. As I later reflected on the experience I was aware that in that rest I had been briefly in ”want of nothing” (Ps 23:1) and was receiving all for which I have longed. Rather than adhering to some method of the intellect or fostering some mood, I was experiencing that anterior to which there is nothing. Stated otherwise, in the aftermath I realized, perhaps unprecedentedly, that the experiencing of Your Presence is not only a journey but also the destination, the terminus, the última for which applicability, conditionality, assessment of benefits, self-analysis, or utility are irrelevant. This awareness, this experience, was yet again shown to me to be Your Real Presence.
This brings yet fuller meaning to the repeated counsel of my spiritual director Murray Rogers half a century ago: “God is enough.” Across the intervening decades my assessment of his nudging gradually shifted from perplexity to wisdom. To say that “You are enough” is to view every “here” and “now” as Jacob’s “gate of heaven” (Gen 28:17), as the ubiquitous possibility of the Celtic “thin place” with its porous membrane, as Merton’s apotheosis at Fourth and Walnut, as the Divinity-drenched translucency of all having being. Yes, in the words of Teresa de Jesús, “God alone suffices.” You are Destination, a statement which could only be made regarding You and after which there can only be silence. Many mystics (e.g., Thomas Keating’s “fourth dimension”) have sought to bring to expression the ubiquity, unsurpassability, and finality of Your Real Presence thus understood.
In the Protestant Reformation a declaration surfaced in the dispute between Luther and Calvin regarding the Eucharist: finítum cápax infiníti. Is or is not the finite capable of receiving the Infinite? It is the central thrust of this post, in harmony with both the Lutheran and Roman Catholic traditions, that You have crafted all manifestations of the finite, the entire creatosphere, with that capability. The genius of Your Incarnation in the Christ is that it points to, indeed renders concrete, what is implicitly operative in all having being. Insofar as “creation” is understood as another word for Your “self-diffusion” (Bonaventure), Your “boiling over” (Eckhart), there can finally be no separation between Your Presence and Your handiwork. Thus the fullest meaning of the Bethlehem enfleshment is, via this extrapolation, the Cosmic Christ. Your self-enfleshment is the window into Your permeation of all you have wrought from the very beginning. The full playing out of Incarnation is Your drawing of all that is into the Oneing of Your Divine Life. Indeed, finítum cápax infiníti!
The Eucharist, the summit of Catholic sacramentality, is then not primarily about substance and accidents. Nor is this Sacrament principally about a unique and sacred ritual in an otherwise secular environment. More than chiefly about creed, theology, or merit, the Sacrament is above all else Your beckoning us into experiencing Your ubiquity in what You have wrought, an invitation into Your macrocosm. It is less “summit” than “doorway,” its larger meaning more universal than merely particular. The materialization You have wrought in the Christ epiphanizes (“showcases”) the ebullítio of Your Divine Life in all having being. That Life pulses and throbs throughout our cosmic abode, our contemporary chaotic and perilous crisis notwithstanding. Any version of the Real Presence short of this is truncated and incomplete. In words Beguine Hadewijch of Brabant might have written, the Real Presence is about the “Totality” of who You are and what You have wrought.
