On Corpus Christi: "When you have loved, really loved, have you not wanted to become bread for your beloved?"

Blessed Feast of Corpus Christi, everyone.

I deeply appreciate Carlo Carretto, and think his spiritual writing ought to be better known.  I was glad to be able to include a clip on how radical the idea of "Corpus Christi" is, through his eyes and work.  From the book, ch 3:

...An even more exacting reality is the Eucharist as the chosen self-limitation of God.  As modern desert father Carlo Carretto said, “Either Christ is a raving madman, or He is truly omnipotent and merciful Love, who has found the most direct road to our hearts, a road that will not frighten or scare us, a road that is as simple as could be.”^[1] [s2] Sharing his very life—body and soul, humanity and divinity--through the humble, sustaining consumption of transubstantiated bread and wine is as divinely self-limiting as one can possibly imagine. But do imagine, as Carlo Carretto does, what that tells us about God:
 Why do you find it strange that I should have wanted to become bread through love? Have you no experience of love? When you have loved, really loved, have you not wanted to become bread for your beloved? … You can argue about the Eucharist as much as you like, but on the day love really takes hold of you, perhaps you will understand that Jesus is not a fool or a madman. To be able to become bread! To be able to nourish the whole world with his flesh and blood! I am terribly selfish and fearful when faced with suffering, but if I could become bread to save all humanity, I would do it. If I could become bread to feed all the poor, I would throw myself into the fire at once. No, the Eucharist is not something strange: It is the most logical thing in the world, it is the story of the greatest love ever lived in the world, by a man named Jesus.^[2]

 If we cannot understand the Eucharist through the strange logic of love, we cannot understand the incarnation. The Eucharist is a natural extension of the Incarnation of God. It is also a divine extension of the law of love: “You shall not … stand by idly when your neighbor's life is at stake” (Lev 19:16).^[3]

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[1] Carlo Carretto, The God Who Comes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974), pg. 113.
[2] Ibid., 115-6. Also, as my colleague Jeff Tranzillo noted, Carretto’s insight could be extended fruitfully to the “confinement” of the Eucharistic Jesus in the tabernacle, waiting for union with us.
[3] The Leviticus passage is from the New English Translation.  In his first post-synodal apostolic exhortation, Pope Benedict offers a beautiful reflection on how the self-giving of the Eucharist, understood as Carretto describes, draws humanity into Jesus’ gift of self to the Father, altering the very dynamic of the world. “The remembrance of his perfect gift consists not in the mere repetition of the Last Supper, but in the Eucharist itself, that is, in the radical newness of Christian worship. In this way, Jesus left us the task of entering into his ‘hour.’ The Eucharist draws us into Jesus' act of self-oblation. More than just statically receiving the incarnate Logos, we enter into the very dynamic of his self-giving. (21) Jesus ‘draws us into himself.’ (22) The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces within creation the principle of a radical change, a sort of ‘nuclear fission,’ to use an image familiar to us today, which penetrates to the heart of all being, a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world, to the point where God will be all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28).” Sacramentum Caritatis #11.

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If you are interested in buying a signed copy of the book, I have a few left.  You can purchase one for $25 plus shipping at www.tobextended.tictail.com.  However, I am on vacation visiting family, and will not be able to mail any out until July 7.  Blessings on your summer!

"We have a God who fights for us."

Miriam.  Image credit.

One of the privileges I have as a college professor is that I teach a class called the Christian View of the Human Person, and the students have an option to write religious autobiographies.  Sometimes these autobiographies are wrenching, other times, joyful, other times, seeking.  But often, they are touching. Like this one: a couple of days ago, one of my students wrote--after a litany of real challenges in her young life--"But thank God: we have a God who fights for us."

We have a God who fights for us.  I immediately thought of Miriam's triumphant song in Exodus, "The Lord is a warrior; The Lord is His name."  We have a God who--for us--fights.  I've never thought of the warrior language in particularly positive ways before; at best, it's not my preferred image of God. But it's a true image.  It's just that the fighting is not violent, not power-over.  Our God fights for us like a physician saving a dying patient, a lover wooing to win his love's attention, a father seeking a child lost in the woods, a teacher using every trick to help the student learn the lesson.  Like a God who is willing to take every measure, short of taking away our will, to lure us into healing relationship with him.  Even becoming human and dying on a cross.

St. Therese de Lisieux, in her autobiography Story of a Soul, tries to explain why she was preserved from being a great sinner, since she feels it was through no merit of her own. I can't find the passage (feel free to tell me where it is!) but her thrust is that she felt she was in some way preserved from sin, received mercy before she could even commit the acts of sin.  I see some unusual relevance here. What if the Lord fights for us, even before we sin?  What would that look like?

Well, it would look like the Theology of the Body.  Original humanity, before the fall, was given the gift of the sign of the ensouled body.  Our bodies speak a primordial language that points to God, before a single word of revelation is handed down.  That sign was created by God.  That was God fighting for us, giving us direction, before we even stepped into the abyss.  But the fighting is not violent.  It is not brutish.  It is gift.

After the fall, the hermeneutic of the gift remains: the ensouled body remains as primordial prophet, and the gift becomes most clearly revealed in the death of the Son of God, a gift of salvation.  God never stops fighting for us.  It is, as David Power wrote, a "Love Without Calculation."

And after the resurrection, the gifting continues, because that is how God fights for us.  "I will send you an Advocate," says Jesus Christ, and the apostles receive the Holy Spirit, become temples of the Holy Spirit and agents of God. If we need to fight, he promises to fight with us: "do not plan what you are to say should they take you to court, the Holy Spirit will give you the words to say."

The law of the gift boils down to this: we have a God who fights for us.  The Lord is a warrior, the Lord is his name.  But like all of Christianity, it's not the fighting we expect.  It's a sacrifice that costs everything--but also changes everything.  We expect God to jig, and he jags.  No matter: soon enough, we realize that God isn't the one writing with crooked lines; we are.  He has fought for us from the beginning of time, in unexpected but entirely consistent ways.  When we listen to Miriam's song this Easter Vigil, let's keep in mind the upside down sacrificial gift of a God who fights for us.

The LORD is my strength and song, And He has become my salvation; This is my God, and I will praise Him; My father's God, and I will extol Him. "The LORD is a warrior; The LORD is His name. (Exo 15:2-3)

Corpus Christi and the Theology of the Body

A little late for the feast of Corpus Christi, but reflections on the eucharist are always on time....

From the the chapter on impairment as sign, in a reflection on the Incarnation as love, gift, and self-limitation of God:

...An even more exacting reality is the Eucharist as the chosen self-limitation of God. As modern desert father Carlo Carreto said, “Either Christ is a raving madman, or He is truly omnipotent and merciful Love, who has found the most direct road to our hearts, a road that will not frighten or scare us, a road that is as simple as could be.” Sharing his very life—body and soul, humanity and divinity--through the humble, sustaining consumption of transubstantiated bread and wine is as divinely self-limiting as one can possibly imagine. But do imagine, as Carlo Caretto does, what that tells us about God:

Why do you find it strange that I should have wanted to become bread through love?

Have you no experience of love?

When you have loved, really loved, have you not wanted to become bread for your beloved? …

You can argue about the Eucharist as much as you like, but on the day love really takes hold of you, perhaps you will understand that Jesus is not a fool or a madman.

To be able to become bread! To be able to nourish the whole world with his flesh and blood!

I am terribly selfish and fearful when faced with suffering, but it I could become bread to save all humanity, I would do it. If I could become bread to feed all the poor, I would throw myself into the fire at once.

No, the eucharist is not something strange: It is the most logical thing in the world, it is the story of the greatest love ever lived in the world, by a man named Jesus.*

If we cannot understand the eucharist through the strange logic of love, we cannot understand the incarnation. The eucharist is a natural extension of the Incarnation of God. It is also an extension of the law of love: “You shall not … stand by idly when your neighbor's life is at stake” (Lev 19:16).

If love is to offer oneself to the other, the Eucharist makes perfect sense. The hermeneutic of the gift reaches its pinnacle in this reality, and it is why we organize our entire faith around it. The law of the gift is presented, taught, and realized in our offering and participation in the Eucharist.


*  Carlo Caretto, The God Who Comes (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1974), pg. 115-6.

What does it mean to be human? Look to Christ--not the prevailing "cult of normalcy"

Antonio Ciseri, Ecce Homo

Reynolds offers pointed analysis on the touted benevolence of tolerance and assimilation, which can “[grant] differences a share of the public space only so long as they do not disrupt or cause inconveniences to a dominant group’s way of life.”^[1]  That doesn’t mean all tolerance is bad.  But it does mean that when tolerance becomes the prime ethical law, there is an inevitable consequence: toleration is granted by those in power, that is, those who set the identity of the group.  Reynolds doesn’t hold back: “Normalcy operates as a cultural system of social control.  On one account, it is simply a way of ordering and bringing meaning to the everyday world shared by a group.  It is unavoidable and itself good.  There is, however, an insidious undertow that accompanies it, working to draw all into a certain caste or type….To state it plainly, the 'normal’ is relative to a group’s values and aspirations, and conversely so, what is attributed ‘abnormal’ (disease, disability, etc.).”^[2]

The cult of normalcy is a real challenge, because we human beings are by nature social beings: we want to belong.  The Theology of the Body audiences are structured on the very idea that “it is not good for man to be alone.”  As such, we are created with a powerful desire to belong to another.  When children are separated from consistent caregivers at a young age, when their belonging is thwarted, the evidence is overwhelming: they do not learn to attach, and they do not thrive.  Basically, they die a slow death less because of lack of food or shelter, and more because they do not belong—the cult of normalcy has made no room for them.  They grow in an environment is not trustworthy, and they respond by withering and dying.^[3]  In a (sometimes) less dramatic example, we see the incredible formative influence of peer pressure--and not just in junior high school.  We see the giddy rush to identify ourselves through social networking’s circles, friends, and followers.^[4]  We must belong, and crave to find our identity through a social group.

Hauerwas: “Christian humanism is determined by the Father’s sending of the Son to be one of us. So humanism must always begin with Jesus’ humanity. When that isn’t the case…compassion becomes a way to say certain people would be better off dead.”

There is a way to avoid the social temptation to define reality through normative groupings and the extension of tolerance, a way given to us in Scripture and revelation: we can look to how God defines what it means to be human through the revealed humanity of Jesus Christ.  And if one thinks that to speak of impairment and disability makes no sense given the life of Christ, one needs to look more closely at both his ministry and the reality of the incarnation and crucifixion--allowing those realities to inform how we learn to see the present.^[5]  It is only then that we can release the impulse to belong from the bondage of the cult of normalcy, and place it where it was meant to be. 

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[1] Ibid.

[2] Ibid., 48.

[3] There is a persistent urban legend about a mid-20^th century Russian experiment that involved institutionalized infants being raised without any human touch or interaction, and half of the group dying as a result.  The 1998 Human Rights Watch report “Abandoned to the State: Cruelty and Neglect in Russian Orphanages” indicates the fabled “experiment” is uncomfortably close to the ongoing truth for special needs children in institutions: children (and later adults, should they live that long), left in cribs all 24 hours of the day, only fed and changed.  However, the story of the experiment likely came from Harry Harlow’s experiments in social isolation of rhesus monkeys, in which isolation left the young monkeys severely disturbed.  The 1960s studies, which would be considered unethical science today, are used to help understand the experience and behavior of children who have been abused or have suffered neglect.  Harlow HF, Dodsworth RO, Harlow MK. "Total social isolation in monkeys," Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1965.

[4] Google plus, facebook, and Twitter.

[5] To quote Hauerwas: “Christian humanism is determined by the Father’s sending of the Son to be one of us.  So humanism must always begin with Jesus’ humanity.  When that isn’t the case…compassion becomes a way to say certain people would be better off dead.” Hauerwas and Vanier, Living Gently in a Violent World: the prophetic witness of weakness, 53.