Adoro Te...Latens Deitas
 

Godhead here in hiding, whom I do adore,
Masked by these bare shadows, shape and nothing more,
See, Lord, at Thy service low lies here a heart
Lost, all lost in wonder at the God Thou art.
 
Seeing, touching, tasting are in Thee deceived:
How says trusty hearing? that shall be believed;
What God’s Son has told me, take for truth I do;
Truth Himself speaks truly or there’s nothing true.

On the cross Thy Godhead made no sign to men,
Here Thy very Manhood steals from human ken:
Both are my confession, both are my belief,
And I pray the prayer of the dying thief.

I am not like Thomas, wounds I cannot see,
But can plainly call Thee Lord and God as he;
Let me to a deeper faith daily nearer move,
Daily make me harder hope and dearer love.

O Thou, our reminder of Christ crucified,
Living Bread, the life of us for whom He died,
Lend this life to me then: feed and feast my mind,
There be Thou the sweetness man was meant to find.

Bring the tender tale true of the Pelican;
Bathe me, Jesu Lord, in what Thy bosom ran——
Blood whereof a single drop has power to win
All the world forgiveness of its world of sin.

Jesu, whom I look at shrouded here below,
I beseech Thee send me what I thirst for so,
Some day to gaze on Thee face to face in light
And be blest for ever with Thy glory’s sight. Amen.
                                                —St Thomas Aquinas
                    (trans. Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.)

This is the year of the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist is “...the source and summit of the Christian life.” “It is the efficacious sign and sublime cause of that communion in the divine life and that unity of the people of God by which the Church is kept in being. It is the culmination both of God’s action sanctifying the world in Christ and the worship we give to Christ and through Him to the Father in the Holy Spirit. By the Eucharistic celebration we already unite ourselves with the heavenly liturgy and anticipate eternal life when God will be all in all.”  [—Catechism of the Catholic Church, Nos. 1325, 1326]

Merely to list the titles by which we identify the Eucharist indicates its inexhaustible riches. We call it:

    Eucharist [Thanksgiving]
    The Breaking of the Bread
    The Eucharistic Assembly
    The Memorial of the Lord’s Passion and Rising
    The Holy Sacrifice
    The Holy and Divine Liturgy [Eastern Rites]
    The Sacred Mysteries
    The Most Blessed Sacrament
    Holy Communion
    Holy Mass
    Holy Hour
    Forty Hours
    All-night/All-day Exposition
    Perpetual Adoration
    Benediction
    Corpus Christi

One might think of the Sacrament in terms of drama, of play. Play is an age-old effort to express reality in terms that deepen our understanding. Drama is life as viewed by a bystander. One pulls back from the real in order to understand it better. We might do something similar with the Eucharist and see it in terms of drama.

In dealing with the faith in the Eucharist, we might also do what children do in confronting the mysteries of life. We can resort to play. Children play. Not play here as games, as sport, as mere watching, even reading. Play as a creative exercise of make-believe. “Let’s pretend.” Reality is reduced to simplest terms, and in the context of that interpretation, children learn. Then later they move out into the real world, having been introduced to its mysteries by a gradual process.

Theater too is an adult form of dealing with the mysteries of life—not as entertainment, amusement, but as drama. It can be a profound experience to sit in the dark with a few hundred, a few thousand others, and see the curtain rise, and so enter a drama in which human forces, the factors we all contend with, the good and evil in each, hatred and love, envy, greed, nobility, fidelity, generosity, betrayal, are acted out before us. An echo of our own situation. A profound learning experience.

We might do something similar with the Eucharist and see it in terms of drama.

We have the setting: we have an altar. And on the altar a plate with bread and a cup with wine. At the altar stands a priest. It is the function of a priest to stand at an altar and offer a sacrifice. He is not a mere minister, or preacher, or evangelist, a pastor. He may also be any one of these, in turn, but his prime action as a priest is to offer sacrifice.

If he offers a sacrifice, there must be a victim. As priest he acts in persona Christi, in the person of Christ, and as Christ-priest, he offers himself as Christ did—both priest and victim. And if there be a victim, someone must put the victim to death. And of course it is we who do that, with our sins. We together with all sinners. The world of sin, the sinner who saw Christ to His death and who does so now. For His death was the fruit of sin, its work. Hence, the impact of Christ’s word: “What you do to the least, you do to Me.” We are not only commemorating a sacrifice offered two thousand years ago, but a current sacrifice because sin is current, contemporary. One sacrifice, indeed, but a perduring one, a perennial one. Lasting all time. Until the last sin is committed.

The death is expressed by the bread and wine become the Body and the Blood of the Lord. The components of the meal become the mode in which the sacrifice is expressed, is accomplished.

For this drama is quite unlike other dramas. What is portrayed, what is acted, performed, is at once symbolic and real. This is not games. This is for real.

For it would seem, would it not, that He bled to death. The agony in the Garden was the beginning. Then the scourging at the pillar. Then the crowning with thorns—all of those bloody. And finally, the nailing of hands and feet and His hanging on the cross until He bled to death. And even after death the lance of the soldier pierced His heart and released the last of the Blood and then water.

The bread and the wine become the consecrated Body and Blood of the Lord and in mystic manner portray the death of the Lord.

But not to our condemnation. Not to reproach. Rather, words of pardon and peace, healing and reconciliation. And an invitation to come and eat and drink at My table, at My altar. And so know My love.

“And so, having put Me to death, should that not release all that is evil in you? By the very deed that put Me to death are you healed.  So come and eat and drink of Me that you may live in My life. And having done so, leave the altar and live in love of one another. Go, and love one another.”

There is, to be sure, nothing like it in the world. There is nothing like it in the world.

Hear what  a secular psychiatrist, Carl Jung says of it, standing awed by the Christian mystery —

 The Mass is an extra-mundane and extra-temporal act in which Christ is sacrificed and then resurrected in the transfigured substances, and this rite of His sacrificial death is not a repetition of the historical event, but the original, unique and eternal act. The experience of the Mass is therefore a participation in the transcendence of life, which overcomes all bounds of space and time.     —Psychological Reflections, p.364

1- This is a talk Fr. Matthew gave to his community of Gethsemani in their Chapter room, Sunday, October 16, 2005, at the request of the Abbot who was absent at the General Chapter of the Order, and thus not available to give his own usual Sunday Chapter talk to the monks.