The hiding place of God, the revelation place of God, is the material world.
You don’t have to put spirit and matter together; they have been together ever since the Big Bang, 14.6 billion years ago (see Genesis 1:1-2 and John 1:1-5). You have to get on your knees and recognize this momentous truth as already and always so. The Eucharist offers microcosmic moments of belief, and love of what is cosmically true. It will surely take a lifetime of kneeling and surrendering, trusting and letting go, believing and saying, “How could this be true?” Gandhi also said, “If I really believed what you believe, I wouldn’t get up from my knees.” The only trouble is that many fervent Christians kneel before the Eucharistic Body of Christ but not the Human Body of Christ that Paul brilliantly describes (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). Remember, it is much easier for God to transform bread than to transform people, and the bread is for the sake of the people.
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)
Eucharist is presence encountering presence—mutuality, vulnerability. There is nothing to prove, to protect, or to sell. It feels so empty, naked, and harmless, that all you can do is be present.
The Eucharist is telling us that God is the food and all we have to do is provide the hunger. Somehow we have to make sure that each day we are hungry, that there’s room inside of us for another presence. If you are filled with your own opinions, ideas, righteousness, superiority, or sufficiency, you are a world unto yourself and there is no room for “another.” Despite all our attempts to define who is worthy and who is not worthy to receive communion, our only ticket or prerequisite for coming to Eucharist is hunger. And most often sinners are much more hungry than the “saints.”
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)
Jesus says, “If you eat this bread you will live forever” (John 6:51). You’re indestructible, as it were. You see, if I live by the momentary identity that others give me, that’s what dies when I die, and I’m left with nothing. Your relative identity is what passes away. When Jesus says He’s giving Himself to you as the “bread of life” and “If you eat this bread you will live forever,” he’s saying, “Find yourself in Me, and this will not pass or change or die. Eat this food as your primary nutrition, and you are indestructible.”
You learn to live in what Thomas Merton would call the True Self—who you are, and always have been, in God. Who you are in God is who you forever are. In fact, that’s all you are, and it is more than enough. Everything else is passing away. Reputations, titles, and roles do not determine our identity. As Paul puts it, “I live no longer; not I, but God lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). When I hand out the bread I love to say to the assembly, “You become what you eat. Come and eat who you are!”
~Adapted from Richard Rohr, Eucharist as Touchstone (CD)
