The Eucharist — Antidote to Loneliness
The ache of loneliness has haunted human beings from the time of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden. It has become particularly acute in modern societies where individualism is rampant and where the acquisition of things is exalted. In these situations, to have and to control are held as more important than to be and to sacrifice. But the false promises of a consumer society will never ease the ache of longing in the heart.
How can there be isolation and loneliness in a society with more forms of communication than ever before? Could it be that something more interior and more profound is needed than what the media can deliver? Sadly, some of the loneliest persons in society are married, members of a family, and surrounded by people every day. Still, the ache of the heart endures.
Seeking consolation in the wrong places Loneliness cannot be overcome by focusing on self, fretting over one’s own needs or catering to desires for power or pleasure. The prospect of happiness moves farther away if attention is fixed on oneself and one’s possessions.
The antidote to loneliness lies in stretching beyond our own little world and reaching out in faith to the living God. St. Augustine, after years of seeking comfort in all the wrong places, eventually discovered this truth and cried out to God, “You made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”
Indeed Augustine is right. No one but God can calm our restlessness. Nothing created can still the longings of the heart. To deal successfully with feelings of being isolated and all alone, we have to reach out to what is greater than our selves. We need to believe in God and to experience His love. This call extends to us all; it is hidden within our loneliness.
Psalm 73 captures this truth in dramatic fashion. In it, a man of faith who has tried to live a virtuous life faces a crisis of intense suffering. His faith is tested to the limit. Finally, he cries out to the Lord (vv 25f), “What else have I in heaven but you? Apart from you I want nothing on earth. My body and my heart faint for joy. God is my possession forever… To be near God is my happiness.”
The Eucharist: A Personal Encounter with God
Success, power and wealth may bring momentary happiness, but not enough to satisfy the restless heart. What satisfies is being near God.
Admittedly, here on earth, our efforts to be near God, to live in His presence, never reach completion. Nonetheless, we can truly be near Him, we can experience His Real Presence, and even receive Him personally into our lives through the sacred mysteries that we call Sacraments, above all in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Jesus spoke of the Eucharist with His disciples, telling them (Jn 6:53), “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you.”
In his book on the Eucharist, “God is Near Us,” Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, explains these words of Jesus in the following way (p. 81), “What is given us here is not a piece of a body, not a thing; but him, the Resurrected one himself — the person who shares himself with us in his love, which runs right through the Cross. This means that receiving Communion is always a personal act… In Communion I enter into the Lord, who is communicating himself to me.”
The Eucharist helps us become a Gift for others
In the Eucharist, Christ addresses our loneliness and sense of isolation; He unites us in love with Himself and also moves us outward towards loving communion with others.
Eucharistic faith is the opposite of individualism, that is the opposite of preoccupation with me, myself and I. St. John Chrysostom says that Christ removes from us those “cold words mine and yours.” In other words, He detaches us from our selfishness and individualistic thinking. He prepares us to become what we have eaten in the Holy Eucharist, i.e. persons ready to make a gift of self for the good of others.
Through and with Christ, we learn to use the words us and our; we learn to pray, “Our Father… Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us…” We learn also to love our neighbor as our self. In Christ, we find the grace and the motivation to do so.
Opening to God and to one another
To partake of Holy Communion is to enter into God’s love to such a degree that we belong to one another as true members of the family of God, sons and daughters of a common Father, brothers and sisters in Christ our Lord.
Benedict XVI (ibid, p 80) says that a person can choose to live in one of two ways, “more inclined to shutting off or more inclined toward communion… he can so shut himself up in selfishness that the body is nothing more than a division, a limit, preventing any communion, and he no longer really encounters anyone in it… But bodily existence can also be lived in the opposite way: as opening oneself up, as the developing freedom of a person who shares himself.”
The wise choice, when we have to deal with loneliness, is the choice of faith in God. Faith, of course, has to be chosen over and over. At times, it may mean crying out to Jesus (Mk 9:24), “I do believe, help my unbelief!” The best choice of all is the choice of making the Eucharist the heart and center of our lives.
I urge all, especially those feeling isolated, to go to Confession frequently where Christ meets and heals us in our greatest fragility, and to receive Holy Communion frequently. In addition, let us deepen our faith in the Most Blessed Sacrament by spending time with Christ in Eucharistic Adoration.
When we live in communion with Him, we are one with the Father and with one another. We never walk alone.
Part Two
In part one of this series, we examined some false solutions for dealing with loneliness and isolation. We considered how something more interior is needed to address this ache of the heart than what the Internet and other media can offer. What is needed is a personal encounter, most especially with the God who loves us. There is nothing that more profoundly unites us with God than Christ’s gift of Himself in the Eucharist.
In part two of this series, it seems important to address some misunderstandings of the Eucharist that hinder some of our contemporaries from meeting Christ and experiencing His love through the Eucharist. Two of these are the problem of finding meaning in suffering and a misconception of sacrifice.
Doesn’t suffering get in the way of love? Doesn’t it harm our dignity as persons? Doesn’t the cost of sacrifice keep us from happiness?
Not according to Pope Benedict XVI and not according to the Lord he serves. Our new pope has written widely on this topic for decades, most notably in his insightful work, “The Spirit of the Liturgy.” Let us consider, then, the nature of sacrifice and the role of suffering in the art of love.
Suffering badly or well
We can waste hours, even days and months, trying to avoid suffering. Something within us, especially within those of us in the most comfortable and prosperous circumstances, recoils at even the thought of suffering. Some contend that it renders life meaningless. Some go so far as to conclude that the reality of suffering clearly disproves the existence of God. Others say, at the very least, that it gets in the way of our peace and joy. But is that in fact the case? Consider the insights of C.S. Lewis, who wrote in “The Four Loves” (p. 169):
“To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything, and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken. If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements; lock it up safe in the casket or coffin or your selfishness. But in that casket — safe, dark, motionless, airless — it will change. It will not be broken; it will become unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable. The alternative to tragedy, or at least to the risk of tragedy, is damnation. The only place outside Heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”
False notions of Sacrifice
Sacrifice lies at the center of authentic love and thus at the center of Catholic worship. It is the heart of what the Eucharist celebrates; it is what the Eucharist makes present and continues down through history. However, as Pope Benedict says in “The Spirit of the Liturgy” (pp 27-28), for most people of our day the true meaning of sacrifice is “buried under the debris of endless misunderstandings.” We tend to see sacrifice in terms of destruction and loss, rather than understanding it as the way to gain close communion with God.
According to our Holy Father (Ibid), sacrifice “means emerging from the state of separation, of apparent autonomy, or existing only for oneself and in oneself. It means losing oneself as the only possible way of finding oneself (cf. Mk 8:35; Mt 10:39).”
Is this not what our hearts all desire? We long to overcome separation and distance, we long for closeness with others in relationships rooted in truth and love.
The Sacrifice of Christ brings about a Union of Love
By dying on the Cross, Jesus made a gift of Himself to the Father. This gift is the Sacrifice that stands above all others. It is an act of perfect love, a love so strong that it overcame the divisions caused by sin. It broke down the barriers that separated people from one another and kept them at a distance from God. The Sacrifice of the Cross brought about a new communion in love, which is more powerful than loneliness and sin, even stronger than death. Jesus foretold this unifying action of the Cross when He said (Jn 12:32), “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”
After offering this perfect sacrifice of Himself to the Father, Jesus rose from the tomb and ascended into heaven. But He did not leave us orphaned. He established a way for us personally to enter into this paschal mystery with Him, to share in His victorious Sacrifice so as to share also in His Resurrection. This way is called the Church. This way unfolds for us especially in the great sacramental action of the Church that we call the Eucharistic Sacrifice.
Reflecting on this great mystery, Benedict XVI says (Idem, p 76), “sacrifice is humanity becoming love with Christ.” Our humanity, through the Sacrifice of the Mass, shares in the Sacrifice of Christ. This Sacrifice, then, frees us from our fears of suffering. It conquers the constrictions of individualism with their imprisoning effect. It sets us free, in union with Christ, to make a gift of self; that is, we are able to love as Christ loves us. This, above anything else, is the goal for the Christian: to be Christ-like. The more that we sacrifice, the more we become who God created us to be: images of His Son.
Suffering with Christ deepens love
Occasionally we meet someone who bears suffering with such dignity that we cannot help but see its value, even its transforming power. Certainly John Paul II was one of those persons.
Following the assassination attempt on his life, while he was still recovering from his wounds, the late Holy Father composed an Apostolic Letter on the Christian Meaning of Suffering, Savificic Doloris. With great insight, he wrote (#26), “Down through the centuries and generations it has been seen that in suffering there is concealed a particular power that draws a person interiorly close to Christ, a special grace.”
We cannot begin to understand the great mystery of the Eucharist, especially its ability to conquer our loneliness, until we see how suffering and sacrifice are profound actions of love. The sacrificial love of Christ is made present every time that the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass is celebrated. What happened on Calvary truly took place at one precise time in human history, 2,000 years ago. Yet what occurred then continues to be present now in the eucharistic liturgy because the One who died is eternal and His redemptive love is without end.
How then could the Eucharist ever be considered boring? How could some say it is out of touch with daily life? For this is the only place, the one sacred event, that gives fullest meaning to our lives. Here we are truly one with Christ.
Copyright 2005 The Catholic Sun.
This item 6661 digitally provided courtesy of CatholicCulture.org
