Dom Mark-Ephrem: The call to live Eucharistic lives

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Dom Mark-Ephrem: The call to live Eucharistic lives

This morning when I spoke to you I quoted in my Talk some lines from the Vatican II Decree on Priestly Ministry, drawing particular attention to the fact that, very significantly, this Teaching Document speaks of the Priest as being first and foremost a Minister of the Word and only after this a Minister of the Eucharist.

I voiced my suspicion that for some this would come as a surprise, for they would probably have seen things the other way round. I began with concentration on the Word – which I claimed to be proper Eucharistic logic. What I propose now is to look at our lives as Servants of the People of God, as Ministers of the Eucharist. This seems to me to be a natural progression.

If I were to give a title to this conference it would be this:

The Call to Live Eucharistic Lives.

Let us begin by listening to the gospel verses relating to the Institution of the Eucharist found in Saint Luke's Gospel. I read in Luke 22:

He sat at table and the apostles with Him. And he said to them: 'I have earnestly desired to eat this Passover with you. And he took a cup and when he had given thanks he said: 'Take this and divide it among your selves' ... And he took bread and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them saying: 'This is my body which will be given for you. Do this in memory of me'. And likewise the cup after supper saying: 'This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood'.

This gift of the Eucharist is, as Henri Nouwen remarks: the most ordinary and most divine gesture imaginable. This is the truth of Jesus, so human yet so divine; so familiar, yet so mysterious; so close yet so revealing! Here Jesus holds nothing back; He gives all.

Here in this gesture, in the offering of his body and blood, Jesus expresses most eloquently his self-giving love. Here we are plunged into the mystery of the incarnation as much as we are plunged into Christ's paschal mystery.

It is on this link Incarnation-Eucharist – the double expression of the immense self-giving love of God revealed in Jesus-Christ - that I will be concentrating this afternoon For, it seems to me that what is asked of us as Christians and a fortiori as priests, ministers of the Eucharist, is to realise this link in our own lives: we are called to live the mystery of our incarnation as Eucharist.

I would like without further delay to remind you of words from the Ordination Rite which illustrate how, by the priesthood we share, we are engaged to enter into and remain at all times firmly rooted in the same attitude of heart which was in Christ Jesus on the eve of His passion: His attitude of self-giving love.

Allow me to quote for you a question that was posed to each one of us on our ordination day:
Are you resolved to consecrate your life to God for the salvation of His people and to unite yourself more closely every day to Christ the High-Priest who offered Himself for us to the Father as the perfect sacrifice?
To which each one of us answered:
I am, with the help of God.

Now, if truth were to be told, I doubt if any of us here remembered the precise wording of that question to which we gave answer in a Solemn Promise on our Ordination day. Yet, I suspect that most would be able to quote what we ask of others in their marriage promises verbatim. What does that say? It says that perhaps we are more attentive to what we ask of others than what is asked of ourselves. And that is dangerous! For, it is when we forget what we have committed ourselves to that we stop living it.

It is absolutely vital for us to live in the constant memory of God and in watchfulness over our ways. This is the great pedagogy of the Bible. Over and over again the Lord calls upon His chosen people to remember.

... To remember… Fundamentally this is what we do when we celebrate Eucharist.
At this time when the Church in Ireland is so broken, so deeply wounded (would it be exaggerated to say, to some extent, pulled apart?) is it not also part of our mission to re-member things? That's to say to help put them back together again, or rather to allow Christ to do that for us. Christ will do this nowhere more than in and through the Eucharist, our re-member-ing sacrament. The Eucharist is, after all, the great gathering, reconciling sacrament of the Church. I am convinced that for the healing and re-construction of the Church in Ireland much will depend on how we as priests enter into the Eucharistic mystery for ourselves and celebrate it for others.

We should not underestimate the healing effect a heart-lived celebration of the Eucharist can have on those who experience it. Do we not approach the Lord's Table pronouncing the words: Say but the word and I shall be healed?

To come back to what we committed ourselves to at our Ordination. The question posed at our Ordination in the Examination of the Candidate clearly underlines that the priesthood is a consecrated life ... (I am not setting out to make monks of you, just quoting the teaching of the Church on the Sacred Ministry ... Over and over again the Decree on Priestly Ministry expounds the notion of priesthood as a life of consecration to God's service.) As a "consecrated life" priesthood is about living a Eucharistic existence. Further on in the ordination ceremony at the Presentation of Gifts these words were addressed to us:
Accept from the holy People of God the gifts to be offered to Him. Know what you are doing and imitate the mystery you celebrate; model your life on the mystery of the Lord's cross.
We are invited there to model ourselves on Christ, to imitate Him in His self offering.

This understanding of the priest's life as a Eucharistic existence was touched on by Pope John-Paul II in his Letter to Bishops and Priests on Holy Thursday 1980, entitled The Mystery and Cult of the Holy Eucharist. Writing there in Chapter I Paragraph II, The Holy Father reminds us that: the priesthood is born effectively at the institution of the Eucharist, as part of it. And he goes on to state: By our ordination (...) we are united in a singular manner and in an exceptional way to the Eucharist. As priests our lives are, in a way, from the Eucharist and for the Eucharist.

All of this places us before our responsibility. The point which is made over and over again in the Church's teaching on the place of the Eucharist in the life of the priest boils down to this: What Jesus lived and continues to live in and through the Eucharist, he invites us His servants and imitators to live in and through the offering of our lives.

This is clear from what He said when He instituted this sacrament of his love for the Church: Do this in memory of me … words paralleled in John's gospel thus: What I have done for you, you must do in your turn.

We will perhaps remember how Saint Augustine used to dare say to those who approached the Communion table: Become what you receive! The logical outcome to this is that our response, our Amen, to the gift of the Eucharist has us say to Jesus in return: I am your body.
When as Ministers of the Eucharist we say in the name of Jesus: This is my body, we should also be engaging ourselves in those words.

Personally, I find great strength and peace in the repetition of the words I am your body, for, they remind us that we live not just for Christ but it is Christ who lives in us. To become what we receive in approaching the Eucharistic Table - and a fortiori presiding at it - is to consent to become bread broken and a cup of blessing shared for all our brothers and sisters in humanity.
In and through the Eucharistic Mystery we enter into the essence of what the kenosis of Christ is all about: accepting to be given, poured out for others. In this way we are led to become sacrament of Christ for all - including those who will perhaps never approach a Eucharistic Table. And is it not increasingly the case that it is with such people that we are led into contact in pastoral situations? More and more people who are turning up on our doorsteps do not usually darken church doors. They come requesting Church weddings, baptism for their children, Christian burial for their loved ones. Although they no longer participate in the sacramental life of the Church regularly, they turn to us in moments of distress, illness, and personal crisis.

All these encounters are an opportunity given to us. Through our meeting with such people, we can become a sacrament of Christ for them.

Just as Jesus said: This is my body given and my blood poured out for all, so we must accept to be given, poured out for all in these privileged meetings which provide opportunity for sharing the gospel message through evangelical attitudes of welcome, compassion, mercy, love.

Perhaps this is the new evangelisation we should be concentrating more effort on. In the past I fear we confused evangelising with "sacramentalising" people. But, is it not first through the sacrament of the brother, who accepts and welcomes the lost - as Christ did - that people are led to the gospel? and only afterwards to the sacraments of the Church?

While the association Christ/The Church/The Eucharist must always be kept in mind, so too the association between the sacrament of the altar and the sacrament of the brother and sister must never be lost sight of. Most often this is understood as meaning that we must see Christ in others: certainly! But the inverse is also true. Others must be able to discern the Eucharistic Christ in us!

In this optic, I now propose that we look at what constitutes the very heart of the Eucharist: the movement that animates the words of the Institution of the Sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood.

Four verbs are to be found in each of the versions of the Eucharistic Institution narratives found in the Scriptures, be that in the writings of Paul or the gospels. The same verbs are to be found in the narratives of the multiplication of the loaves and in the manifestation of the Risen Christ at Emmaus. These same verbs punctuate our Eucharistic celebrations. The attitudes of our hearts should reflect them if we want to live Eucharistic lives.

First of all, JESUS TOOK THE BREAD. This is the offertory of the Eucharist.
Then HE GAVE THANKS. This is the Eucharistic Prayer.
Next HE BROKE THE BREAD. This is the fraction of the Eucharist.
Finally, HE GAVE THE BREAD to them; HE SHARED THE BREAD with them. This is communion.

Just as Jesus took the bread and offered it, so like Jesus, we must take our lives in our hands in order to be able to give them. We must remember here at this point that we cannot give away what we have not first of all owned! The implication is that we must have received and accepted ourselves in order to live the offering of our being.
So many of the difficulties we meet with in life are rooted precisely in our struggle with self-acceptance.

Since we are talking of the Body of Christ, I will take an example in regard to the rapport that we have with our own bodies and bodily-ness to illustrate my point. This example permits me to allude in passing to what remains an essential dimension of the priesthood for the vast majority of priests of the Latin Church. (I note that we have no Anglican married clergy converts in our midst!) I am, of course, referring to celibacy. And let us be honest this has understandably become a source of great malaise in the Church today. Although the official discourse is that there is no link between celibacy and the scandals which have come to light, the gut feeling and experience of most priests is that there is a link, if not with celibacy per se, certainly with the way in which it is being lived out, and in the lack of reflection, formation and help given to assist priests to live their celibacy in a healthy, life-giving manner.
If celibacy is to be lived and understood in any sort of meaningful, life-giving way, then we must grasp it as being about more than negation of self, denial, just a heavy weight imposed upon us, something to be endured.

We must come to see what we are called to as celibates is to love in a celibate way, to love - God, ourselves and others - chastely in the celibate state. Now in order to be chaste, to live the offering of our sexuality, we must first of all have received it. Only the person who has welcomed his sexuality as a gift from God can live the offering of it in a just manner, in a humanising, peaceful, integrated, liberating way. I would go as far as to say, in a fruitful way. And let us remember that all of us are called to be fruitful, that is part of our vocation as God's creatures. A sterile, fruitless, existence, a hard and shrivelled up heart does not glorify the Lord of life. St Thomas Aquinas would suggest that despite his continence, a person with such a heart, is in fact unchaste.

I would say that most often the difficulties we experience in the domain of our sexuality do not stem from ill will, or even lack of will, some thought-out resistance, but from the fact that we are ill at ease with this domain of our being, that we fail to welcome it as a gift. The more we try to ignore it, the more it will cry out for our attention. Only those who have received their bodies and their hearts can make the gift of them.

JESUS GAVE THANKS
Like Christ we are all called to make of our lives a living sacrifice of praise. Saint Paul addressed this call to us through those lines he wrote to the Romans in the opening verse of chapter 12 of his letter to that Christian community. I quote: I appeal to you therefore, brethren, by the mercies of God, to present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.

While the Eucharist is, and we too are called to be, a living sacrifice of praise, if we were honest, would we not have to admit that all too often, praise/thanksgiving is the poorest element of our prayer, its most neglected dimension?

What place do we give to praise in our personal prayer each day? .... Oh, fair enough, some might say thanks to God for their health and strength each day, for example, but do we enter into the presence of the Divine Majesty each and every day in a spirit of adoration and awe, with praise in our hearts? I would like at this point to say a word about a psalm of praise with which we are all familiar: Psalm 65 (64 in the Breviary). This ancient prayer has us say to God in the opening line: To you our praise is due, O God.

However, the Hebrew scholars would have us remark that there is a difficulty of translation here. They note that the word employed in the Hebrew has the same root as that used to say that man is made in the image and likeness of God. Some then would conclude that we could translate the verse in question as saying literally: It is praise that resembles you, which reflects you, which corresponds to what you are. Praise then reflects God's glory. An attitude of praise allows some of God's glory to shine through man. Praise therefore is nothing less than a duty for us who are called to reflect the image of God to others.

The psalm goes on to make clear that praise is not just a personal affair, but a form of prayer to be lived together with others in the Church ... It is in Sion that praise is due ... that is to say, in and with God's people.

We are thus reminded of the duty priests have to form community spirit within the People of God. I read again in the Vatican II Decree on Priestly Ministry: The pastor's task is not limited to individual care of the faithful. It extends by right also to the formation of a genuinely Christian community. (...) No Christian community is built up which does not grow from and hinge on the celebration of the most holy Eucharist. From the Eucharist all education for community spirit must begin.

Furthermore, the prayer of praise and our supplication for the Church's unity are closely related. We just have to read Christ's High Priestly prayer (John 17) to see this. There it becomes immediately apparent how praise gives impulse to the supplication for unity ... praise both comes from unity and leads to it.

There is something terribly askew in the life of a priest who does not carry in his heart a passionate concern for the unity of the Church, all the People of God. Many priests, most priests, still have a very long way to go here!

In entering into the new millennium John-Paul II addressed these words to us: What can I say about the urgency of promoting communion in the area of ecumenical commitment? The prayer of Christ in the Cenacle "that all may be one" reminds us that it is necessary for us to welcome and develop the gift of unity in an ever more profound manner. The invocation "ut unum sint" is at one and the same time an imperative which obliges us and a force which strengthens us. It is also a salutary reproach in regard to our laziness and narrowness of heart in the domain of inter-church relationships! (para. 48)

In Ut unum sint he stated: Ecumenism is an imperative of charity ... an imperative which admits no exception. (Ut unum sint 99)

The Northern Irish Catholic's excuse that there is little or no point of engagement on this front because of the bigotry or closed attitude of those we refer to as "the other side" just isn't acceptable! Ecumenism is an imperative which admits no exception … and no lame excuse, concealing our own sectarian attitudes!

... After having given thanks JESUS BROKE THE BREAD
This is the fraction. In the same way as Jesus allowed himself to be broken and shared out because of his love for all, so must we.

The example and message of Christ show us that all those who seek to imitate him will be broken/wounded by love. Therefore a priestly life, a Christian life- and I would venture to say any human life - that has not yet experienced a breaking of the heart has not yet been fully lived!

Our heart has to be broken open to others, prised open to give and to receive. In the same way as there can be no sharing of the loaf without the breaking of bread, without the breaking open of our hearts we cannot enter into shared life with God or others.

Finally ... JESUS GAVE THE BREAD TO HIS DISCIPLES.
The Eucharist/our priesthood are authenticated if they lead us to share/to give our lives.
Some celibate priests are simply afraid of sharing their lives and so hold back. Even though they will repeat the discourse that the whole point of being celibate is about being available to all!

Let's dare to admit it: a celibate lifestyle can so easily become a selfish lifestyle. We can feel that we owe ourselves so much by way of compensation in lieu of the great sacrifice asked of us – according ourselves many rights because of all that celibacy deprives us of.

I remember one Protestant minister friend accompanying me to a priest's house – already in the driveway the car struck him and then, as we entered the house together, he whispered, "This place just smells of wealth". Later on, in the same house, I heard another minister quip: "We might have our better halves, but these Catholic fellahs certainly have better quarters!" (Understand me! I am not saying that priests don't need basic comforts to live healthy, human/humane lives. But it happens that we encounter exaggerations here.) As has been rightly remarked, the Eucharist is the Sacrament of the poor. A Eucharistic life will seek then in some real way to reflect Christ's own poverty.

To live a Eucharistic life implies our willingness to be part of the gathering together in unity of the Church of all God's scattered children in order to be a sign of that communion in Christ to which the world is called.

The teaching of Christ's High Priestly Prayer is that the effectiveness of our Christian witness depends upon our unity. The Eucharist is the sacrament of unity. The sign that we are living truly Eucharistic lives will be whether or not we are building up community among the People of God to whom we minister.

We must never lose sight of the fact that in a very real sense the Eucharist is a missionary sacrament. It sends us forth to love and serve the Lord. It never concludes; it is pursued in the whole of life. Instead of saying The Mass is ended we could better say The Eucharist continues ... "Go forth in the peace of Christ"

The Eucharist is a transforming power in the world. It transforms the most basic elements, food and drink, literally what we need to live, in order to make of these the sacrament of God's presence in the world. By the whole of our life as priests we are called to proclaim that God is in the midst of his people.

By living our ordinary lives as gift received and given we become living proclamation of God's extraordinary love for all. May our meeting with the Lord of the Eucharist, God-with-us, during this Day of Reflection renew and strengthen us for the mission confided to us!

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