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REAL PRESENCES:
Personal Encounters with the Gift of the Eucharist
01
Introduction to Real Presences
by Michael P. Murphy
The last Eucharistic Congress that took place in the US was of the international variety. It was in 1976, America’s bicentennial year, an ecclesial gathering of over 1.5 million people in the most historically consequential of American cities, Philadelphia, PA...
02
Eucharist
by John F. Deane
‘Love bade me welcome’, George Herbert wrote in the early 17th century, ‘but my soul drew back, guilty of dust and sin.’ In the early 21st century that poem still resonates in the soul...
03
The Eucharist: Being Seen
by Sally Read
Sitting in a convent chapel I once read, on a scrap of paper, these words by Saint Thérèse of Lisieux: One of the greatest pains is that of not being understood. I wish I could tell you where in her writing that line is from...
04
The Ghent Altarpiece
by Timothy O'Malley
“It’s a stroke.” A big one. I received the call in the afternoon while at a conference in Belgium. My grandmother, after years of suffering from dementia, was nearing the end of her life. I was in Leuven, thousands of miles away...
05
One Last Look Before You Leave
by David Kang
My Father has this inscrutable expression in his immigration photo - alternately smiling, stoic, and sorrowful like an Eastern Orthodox Icon. I can project onto his 34 year old face a grieving for the home he left behind and his hope for what lay ahead...
06
Drive-Through Communion
by Philip Metres
We pulled up on our bicycles, my 18-year-old daughter Adele and I, and took our place in a line of cars on the blazing asphalt parking lot behind St. Dominic. It was summer 2020, and we’d been cooped up for too much of spring and early summer, waiting for the lockdown to end...
07
Our Town & the Eucharist
by Mary Grace Mangano
Strangely enough, a fictional female character’s desire to communicate beyond the grave with her loved ones has taught me something about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. I first read Our Town by Thornton Wilder when I was in eighth grade...
08
Going up to the Altar of God, Reading and Shaking
by Randy Boyagoda
The opening pages of James Joyce's modernist epic Ulysses (1922) have long been very important to my understanding of why the Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives. Joyce makes the case in breach of this truth, though the vitality of his creative act depends on the vitality of God's creative act...
09
Ex opere operato
by Paul Elie
For three decades, the center of my encounter with the Eucharist has been a Latin doctrine that I learned about not in school or at church but on assignment -- while reporting and writing a piece of long-form journalism...
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10
The Eucharist: “Cohesive as the Spirit”
by Kimberly Rae Connor
“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...
11
Take, Lord, Receive All
I Have and Possess
by Stephen Doran
Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will... From high school on, I had worshiped at the pagan altar of achievement. While the ancients prayed before Baal or Chemosh, modern day idolators pay homage to whatever or whomever brings pleasure, wealth or power...
12
Food for the Journey
by Joseph Vukov
Fordham University Church. 2010. I’m a first-year PhD student in Philosophy, and attending some of my first Catholic Masses. As a wayward Evangelical, stumbling my way back into Christianity, the Mass strikes me as ancient. And ornate. And formal...
13
True Food, True Drink
by Xueying Wang
My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them. (John 6:55–56) Upon reading these words, we may always feel the urge to interpret them metaphorically or otherworldly...
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14
Renovation
by Mike Aquilina
In a Polaroid shot taken the day of my first Communion, I am magnificent. I wear the boys' standard blue suit with white shirt and clip-on blue tie. My hair is an unruly mop of curls. My parents flank me like the cherubim — tired cherubim...
15
Ahu na Obara nke Kristi
by Chika Unigwe
Growing up cradle Catholic in Enugu, Nigeria, I received my first Communion as a child. The preparatory process was rigorous, spanning over a year or two with catechism lessons divided into stages akin to school terms. Passing each stage was compulsory before progressing to the next, culminating in the final exam that marked the readiness for first Communion...
16
This Thing that Is the Eucharist
by James Matthew Wilson
I once gave a very kind woman a shock. She and I were having a good conversation to while away the time before a flight at the airport, when the subject of the Eucharist arose. A lifelong Unitarian, and a literary scholar, the woman had no personal experience of the sacrament...
17
The Bread, the Wine, the Wedding
by Shann Ray
Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, “My brother asked the birds to forgive him: that sounds senseless, but it is right; for all is like an ocean, all is flowing and blending; a touch in one place sets up movement at the other end of the earth.” A humbling directive, and I’m compelled to listen...
18
The Mass for the Half-Hearted
and the Corrupt
by William T. Cavanaugh
The main character in Graham Greene’s novel The Power and the Glory is an unnamed fugitive priest, the last in the Mexican state of Tabasco, where a ban on Catholicism was strictly enforced in the 1930s. The priest moves from town to town, saying Mass for the poor villagers...
19
Taste Bread at Emmaus that Warm Hands Broke and Blessed
by Michael P. Murphy
Like many, on my bedside table I keep a mini library. Most of the books cycle in and out but there are two or three anchor texts that stay in constant circulation—books that, well, keep me anchored. The Habit of Being, a posthumous collection of Flannery O’Connor’s personal letters is one such book...
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