The Eucharist:
“Cohesive as the Spirit”

“Tell him you are a baby Catholic,” a dear Jesuit friend implored me as we queued up to meet Pope Francis during a special audience at the Vatican that he had invited me to attend. I had been a “professional” Catholic for over two decades while serving on the faculty of a Jesuit university but the personal move from Protestant to Catholic was recent and took some time. As I slowly steeped in Ignatian spirituality and Catholic mission and identity, I came to accept that becoming Catholic was not leaving the home of my childhood faith but coming home to Christ as I found Him in my present reality. Although this is how my conversion felt, I hadn’t yet fully discerned how I arrived at this feeling. Meeting Pope Francis helped me to recognize that it was transubstantiation experienced not as a mystical act performed by a priest but as the manifestation of human desire to connect that led me home to Christ. 

 

Only weeks from tasting my first Eucharist as a Catholic, I was still deep in mystagogy when I was blessed by Pope Francis. The encounter took me deeper into the mysteries of my new faith. When Pope Francis grasped my hands I found myself mute, overcome by what St. Ignatius called “the gift of tears.” All that came out of my mouth was a quiet, “Grazie mille, Papa.” I couldn’t summon the words to tell him how Ignatian spirituality had first awakened and then converted me. But just as Word became flesh first in the Incarnation and still always in every eucharistic blessing, so this clasping of human flesh became my words, the only ones I really needed and distinctly reflective of my particular journey. “A Word made Flesh,” Emily Dickinson writes, “each one of us has tasted…to our specific strength.” I was indeed a baby Catholic, like an infant who feels presence before recognition, who understands love before language. I may have lacked words, but I had the Word as embodied in the Eucharist, what Dickinson calls “this loved Philology.” 

​

When Pope Francis grasped my hands I found myself mute, overcome by what St. Ignatius called “the gift of tears.” All that came out of my mouth was a quiet, “Grazie mille, Papa.”

 

This feeling of divine connection made possible by human touch was akin to my first Eucharist, when my prior experience of communion as a symbolic act was transformed into the Real Presence. In the Eucharist I encountered not just Christ’s divinity but His humanity, too, all he suffered and surrendered for our sake out of love. The reassurance of Christ’s real presence consoles me when I reflect on the imminent absence of my increasingly frail mother, when I project my own death and departure from my son’s life, and when I face the current loneliness wrought by separation from my tribe. My mother’s faith brought me into the Christian faith; my son’s conversion led me to the Catholic Church; and my Jesuit mentors called me by name and said I was theirs. Now when I receive the Eucharist, I feel in my soul that my mother will always be with me, that I will never leave my son, and that my Jesuit mentors will accompany me throughout my life. We are held together in Spirit, forever present to each other in the Eucharist. 

 

In her poem #1651, Emily Dickinson reassures me of what I have come to experience in the Eucharist: that “A Word that Breathes Distinctly / Has Not the Power to Die” and that in the end, “This Loved Philology,” this attempt at speaking to the Word through our fumbling and failing words and our fraught and finite human relationships, illustrates that we are “Cohesive as the Spirit.” All our hope and consolation is in Christ, embodied in the Eucharist, and in the “Word made Flesh,” first felt, then tasted, finally proclaimed. 

 

#1651

By Emily Dickinson

 

A Word made Flesh is seldom

And tremblingly partook

Nor then perhaps reported

But have I not mistook

Each one of us has tasted

With ecstasies of stealth

The very food debated

To our specific strength —

 

A Word that breathes distinctly

Has not the power to die

Cohesive as the Spirit

It may expire if He —

“Made Flesh and dwelt among us”

Could condescension be

Like this consent of Language

This loved Philology.