The Eucharist, Part 3

The Eucharist, Part 3

Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life…for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me and I in them.[1]

It seems to me that the key to experiencing the Eucharist or communion as Jesus intended has less to do with ritual or food but with remembering. “Do this in remembrance of me,”[2] Jesus said as he gave his disciples bread and wine at the Last Supper. Remembering who Jesus was and thus, who we are destined to become, is the essence of our salvation as Christians. And who was Jesus but the conscious embodiment of spirit in human form – son of God and son of Man, a product of body and spirit equally expressed, which is the Christ. He managed, through conscious awareness, to unite his spiritual and physical natures and become an embodiment of the Christ. We, too, are spiritual beings in human form destined, like Jesus, to take our place in and as the body of Christ. But because most of us will not let go of the illusory separation between our physical and spiritual aspects we find it easier to worship Jesus in his divinity than to follow Jesus in his humanity. Following Jesus requires a much higher degree of commitment.

When we combine one of Jesus’ first teachings – follow – with one of his last – remember – we have a path laid out for enlightenment, redemption, oneness, salvation, or whatever we wish to call it. We reunite the aspects of ourselves we often repress, and we find our wholeness – our holy-ness – in our Oneness with everything that is. To follow Jesus does not mean to copy his life to ours. He lived in a very different time and culture. Rather, it means to live our lives in our time and culture as he lived his life in his. We adopt and adapt his way of non-violence, inclusion, care for, and love of others to our life situations. And we remember that he did not do it alone. Jesus frequently renewed and refocused his energy and Oneness through regular time alone in prayer.

But is conscious awareness really all that is lacking? That seems so simplistic. How impactful can something be if it has no tangible essence? Some will argue that conscious awareness is not a real thing because it is all in our head. It is only something we make up or imagine – like a dream or a fictional story. In the last of the Harry Potter books, Harry and Professor Dumbledore (who had died some chapters earlier) found each other in a dream-like scene in a location resembling a deserted  train station. Harry asked, “Tell me one last thing…Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?” Dumbledore responds, “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?”[3] The simple fact is that everything tangible and real begins and is sustained in the mind, some of which then manifests physically. Whatever we build or create starts as an idea or an inspiration, including our families and friends. Just because something has yet to become physically embodied does not make it less real. In fact, non-embodied creations retain their realness long after physically-embodied creations have crumbled into oblivion. We limit our experience of the scope of possibility by pretending that whatever cannot be seen or physically sensed is not real. It leads us to assume the work Jesus did was by some sort of mystical magic that we could never hope to perform, in spite of his claim that we would “do the works (he did) and, in fact, will do greater works than these.”[4] What is required is belief in him, or conscious awareness of who he was and what he attained. We must remember.

There is a sense in which consciousness is the connecting bridge between tangible, physical and intangible, non-physical expressions of reality. It is the awareness that encompasses body and spirit in a single, unbroken continuum. Until we can freely traverse that bridge and see that the two sides differ only in how they express, we will remain un-whole or unholy. We will hope the priest or minister administering the Eucharist or communion has some magical power to transform the bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ. Once we can perceive the sides as a single reality, we can receive the body and blood of Christ through Hostess Twinkies and chocolate milk (not recommended) if we choose. Our conscious awareness and acknowledgment of the inherent unity of body and spirit, bread and wine, life and death is indeed our pathway into the body of the Christ. That change in consciousness transforms our entire life experience.

This is the 39thin a series titled Crucifying Christianity, Resurrecting the Way.Life Notes are my explorations into mysteries that interest me. They are invitations for readers to explore more deeply into life’s mysteries. Engage with me or explore contemplative spiritual direction at ghildenbrand@outlook.com.

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[1] John 6:54-56

[2] Luke 22:19

[3] Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, J.K. Rowling, Arthur A. Levine Books, 2007, p. 723.

[4] John 14:12