FOOD FOR THE SOUL
A family friend’s school age daughter interviewed me recently for a class assignment on the Eucharistic Revival. “Why do you think people struggle to understand the Eucharist today?” was one of her central questions…
Sitting in Mass last week on Holy Thursday, during the homily, the Priest spoke about how if we had the consciousness to realize that Christ was present in the Eucharist our whole life would be forever transformed in that moment…
It’s clear that people today struggle to understand the reality and significance of the Eucharist. As my family friend’s daughter asked, “why is that?” I don’t think it’s the answer this priest offered. I don’t think it’s that we’re failing to educate our children about what the Church teaches the Eucharist is. I don’t even think it’s that we’ve lost much of the reverence in our Mass that we once had—though it is a tragedy that we’ve lost that.1
I believe that our loss of understanding of sin, in principle, and of our sins, in particular, is what drives our loss of understanding of what the Eucharist is and does for us. But here’s the catch: we can’t just learn about sin in the abstract and then grow in our understanding of the Eucharist—as if a strong instructional curriculum & teaching method around the mechanics of sin will solve the problem. That helps!, certainly!—but it is not even the chief part of the answer.
The chief part of the answer is that people have stopped striving after greatness. People have given up. People have stopped trying to demand the impossible out of themselves. People have turned their gaze away from glory. They’ve substituted true glory for worldly glories; they’ve substituted a consciousness of failure for a comfort of self-assurance. People have shrunk from what was difficult and consigned themselves to mediocrity.
If you want to truly understand sin, all you have to do is strive after truly great things, without wavering, and your sin will slowly but clearly present itself to your eyes. If you want to truly understand sin, try to be great, and the more you try at that, the more you will experience all the ways you are holding yourself back and getting in your way. Strive after spiritual greatness and your sin will expose itself to you.
What the Eucharist is and does—what the Church teaches the Eucharist is and does (i.e. it is Jesus and it nourishes our spiritual life)—will become both evident and insatiably desirable to us.
If we grow in our desire for the Eucharist, we’ll see our consciousness of the Eucharist expand. If we grow in our desire for the Eucharist, we’ll organically bring greater reverence to the mass—and help others to restore the reverence of the mass. If we grow in our desire for the Eucharist, then the reception of the Eucharist with right faith will have the power to transform us.
Knowledge vs. Experience
I do not play hockey. I’m not good at hockey. I know this about myself. I’m not in the dark about this… However, since I don’t ever play hockey, I don’t really have much experience as to why I’m bad at hockey. I’m not really aware of what stands in my way to being better. Generally speaking, I know I have to get better at everything, but the actual reality of getting better at hockey, by getting better at particular aspects of the game, is totally foreign to my mind.
The same goes for the spiritual life.
Any person that has overcome an addiction can attest to the fact that they didn’t know how truly deep the addiction had a grip on them and their life until they tried to quit their bad habit. It’s only when they attempt to stop that they realize how attached they are to thing… You won’t know how addicted you are to coffee until you try to stop—and then you won’t know the depths of it until you try to stop for 3 months, and then 6 months, and then indefinitely. Most people won’t even attempt to stop! They’ll just claim up front that that’s not a problem and ignore trying altogether.
The same goes for the spiritual life.
Many young boys don’t know how addicted they are to video games because they never try to give them up—or if they stop, they stop for a weekend, go, “well that wasn’t so bad, I guess I’m fine”, or “oh man, yeah I do have a problem”, and then stop trying to perfect their habit thereafter.
Many adolescent boys don’t know how addicted they are to pornography and masturbation because they’ve never tried to stop.
Many college age men and women don’t know how addicted they are to drinking/drugs because they never try to stop.
Unless we have an experience of our weaknesses, and we apply ourselves with persistence to overcoming them, we will not know the depth and reality of our sin & weakness, nor will we be able to intuit why we would need the help of Christ at all.
Learning about sin can begin to help, but eventually we have to strive after hard and meaningful things if we are going to apply that knowledge at all.
The Spiritual Life
The spiritual life consists in denying ourselves and loving God & neighbor.
“‘If any man would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me.’” (Mt. 16:24)
“And he said to him, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.”(Mt. 22:37-40)
Most of us never try to deny ourselves. The three appetites pertain to sex, food, and drugs. The majority of people in our society have never gained virtue in any of the three appetites. It’s no wonder then that they’re completely oblivious to either their weakness, or their need for divine assistance (i.e. grace).
Most people never take seriously the command of charity—to love God & your neighbor for the sake of loving God. As Thomas Aquinas explains in De Malo, the command of charity informs our understanding of mortal vs. venial sin (DM:VII:1resp). Mortal sins are any sins that cause unjust harm to God or your Neighbor. They’re mortal because they kill charity (the life of grace) in the soul. It’s only if we really try working at this that we realize how bad we are at it and how much help we need from our Lord.
In trying to stop all forms of gossip in my life (detraction, reviling, slander, rumormongering), it wasn’t until confessing to it for over a year straight in the confessional—sometimes a mere day after having previously confessed it—that it began to really dawn on me both A) how hard the demand of charity truly is, and B) how much I need God’s assistance to come to Christian perfection.
If we don’t have experience of our weaknesses and our faults—if we don’t persist in going after good and difficult things—it won’t matter what we know about Christ, or the Eucharist, or even sin: it will carry no weight with us.
Try to Become A Saint
Don’t listen to our modern society insist that if you want to become a saint you have to give up on trying to be a saint. This is a false notion of humility that suffers from a philosophical incompetency in our general population… What people are trying to say is that desiring external recognition for your life of faith/virtue will disqualify you from actually living the life of faith/virtue. That is true. External recognition is a secondary effect; you must do a thing for its own sake for it to be good and virtuous; therefore, trying to be good for the external recognition of being good disqualifies doing good in the first place. (Cf. Mt. 6:1-18: concerning almsgiving; concerning prayer; concerning fasting.)
But as to the essence of what it means to be a saint, it is nothing other than loving God. And as to the essence of being a greater (vs. lesser) saint, it consists in nothing other than losing more of yourself, and thereby giving over more of yourself to God, for total love of God.
You must strive to truly become a saint to grow in the life of faith. Strive to love God, and love Him the greater by losing more of yourself that you might dissolve more fully into Him. You should both know that you’re striving for it, and what it means to strive for it—and then strive for it! If you don’t, you won’t ever understand any of the aspects of the life of faith in any meaningful way.
Food for the Soul
The Eucharist is nourishment for the soul. It is substantial nourishment, not merely symbolic. Jesus is literally present in the Eucharist, and sanctifying grace is nourished by our reception of it.
When the Church proclaims that Christ is literally and substantially present in the Eucharist, it does so in order that we might know the divine aid our Lord is giving us every time we receive it. If you’re not striving for the life of faith, its effects won’t take in you—there will be nothing for it to help. If someone gives me advice on how to be a great hockey player, but I’m not ever playing hockey, it’s not going to help… If you are striving for the life of faith, however, the Eucharist will help prepare you to take on the challenges you face in front of you.
Like an athlete, if you have a big game coming up soon, you nourish your body with food beforehand. In the spiritual life, the spiritual warfare that faces you at every turn is like having to perform at the level of a Superbowl, or World Cup finals match, every day. If you don’t nourish yourself beforehand, you have no chance. So it is with our propensity to sin—without the grace of God, and our striving after sinlessness, and nourishment of that grace, we’re not going to make it.
The Master Teacher
If you want to be great at anything, you appreciate the advice of the greater more than the lesser. Who, wanting to play in the NFL, wouldn’t appreciate the advice, the instruction, and the help of a Hall of Famer? Who, wanting to be a world class soccer player, wouldn’t appreciate the advice, the instruction, and the help of someone like Lionel Messi? So if you want to be great in the spiritual life, look to Christ, and draw whatever guidance and wisdom from the Saints that you can—those who Our Lord has raised up for our edification.
If you strive after the hardest, most demanding thing of all—progress in the spiritual life—you will quickly realize how deficient you are, how much you need the Lord’s help as often as you can get it, and how marvelous it is when God brings us through a weakness and transforms our weaknesses into strengths. Your weaknesses are not meant to be final—the Lord wants to perfect you. And your perfection will be to His greater glory. “For God has consigned all men to disobedience, that he may have mercy upon all.” (Rom 11:32)
The Lord’s assistance is always on offer, but you won’t have any of it if you’re too scared, too soft, or too disinterested in pursuing the life of faith to seek it out. “Ask, and you shall receive. Seek, and you shall find. Knock, and the door shall be opened to you.” (Mt. 7:7) It’s not just learning about sin that will make the difference—it’s the one-two combo of striving after the life of faith, paired with learning about sin and grace, that will make the difference. But the first key is striving after the life of faith with all that you have.
That’s what I think is so drastically missing in our society today and what needs to be recovered.
May God bless you and keep you along your journey toward Him in this life. +
RE: The Trad Community
In its best sense, the Trad community represents those individuals wanting to take their spiritual life seriously. They know that the way they were living before was insufficient and left them empty and enslaved to sin. They know they want more out of life—and they come to believe the radical promises of the Christian faith and the Catholic Church throughout the ages are true. In its best sense, the Trad community is striving after the difficult task of utterly dissolving oneself in God, and it’s for that reason that the Trad community gravitates toward orthodox doctrine in their priests & bishops; toward the most reverential form of Mass they can find; toward the saints as their rule of faith. It’s that striving that disposes them to be illumined by the perennial truths of the Church, and they must be encouraged to continue that striving—it is a gift- and the working- of the Holy Spirit.
Thanks, AJ.
"And unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required: and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more." Luke 12:48
The more we grow in faith, the more evident and costly our shortcomings become. The less we know, the more mercy will be given. We who have striven for greatness are held to high accountability.