I am writing this column in the chapel at OSV, sitting in the dark before the Blessed Sacrament. I don’t always write this way, but when I do, I find that my thoughts are more focused, the words flow more freely, and my columns turn out better. (You, dear reader, may of course disagree.)
I started writing in the chapel in the early days of COVID-19, when, on March 13, we sent everyone to work from home, and I kept coming into the office. When Msgr. Owen Campion removed the Blessed Sacrament from the chapel and I extinguished the sanctuary lamp, we, too, went home, and over the next few months, I started writing on occasion down the street at Sts. Peter and Paul, with all the same benefits.
To one extent or another, all of us have bought into the modern scientific worldview that limits “experience” to those things that we can see, smell, touch, feel and taste. And yet, when I am writing in the chapel, I experience something different from when I’m writing at the kitchen table at 5 a.m., or on the porch swing in the evening, or in my library later at night. I enjoy writing in each of those places, but the qualitative difference between writing in front of the Blessed Sacrament and writing anywhere else is not a matter of this or that sense.
It’s a matter of presence. His presence.
And whatever else I may be able to say about writing at the kitchen table or on the porch swing or in the reading chair in my library, that particular presence of Christ is not there. And that makes all the difference.
Serving on the executive team for the USCCB’s National Eucharistic Revival, I’ve had the opportunity to ask many people what they think we should do to help Catholics (and, ultimately, everyone) come to believe once again (or for the first time) in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. There’s nothing wrong with the standard answers — better catechesis; more beautiful liturgies and doctrinally strong hymns; an emphasis on preparation for receiving Communion, including more frequent confession; more opportunities for Eucharistic adoration — but I’m not convinced that they address the problem, because I’m not sure that we truly understand what the real problem is. The desire for all of those things naturally follows from an experience of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist. A better understanding of what it is that we’re experiencing, and opportunities to experience that reality more fully and more often, can deepen that experience and help us keep from losing it amid the distractions of modern life.
Yet are we assuming too much? What if the chief problem that we face isn’t that people who once experienced Christ’s presence in the Eucharist have lost that experience or forgotten what it means? What if the real problem is that they never truly experienced Christ’s presence in the Eucharist?
That, we could say, is a failure of catechesis, but not in the way that most people mean it. Instead of failing to tell people that the Eucharist is the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ truly present on the altar, what if we have failed to prepare them to enter into that very mystery so that they can experience that reality for themselves?
What is more likely to convince you that a man is a great cook — having someone explain to you why he is, or sampling the food he has prepared? Once you have tasted his meal, of course, your appreciation for it may be deepened by discussing it, but until you have experienced his cooking, all the discussion in the world may be just words.
What if the reason for the widespread lack of belief in the Real Presence today is not our failure to discuss in intellectual terms what the Eucharist is but our failure to engage the imagination of those about to receive the Eucharist (whether for the first, or for the hundredth, or for the thousandth time) so that they can experience his presence?
Scott P. Richert is publisher for OSV.
