I wasn’t expecting much from the National Eucharistic Congress.
Oh, I knew the lineup of speakers and musicians was stellar. But I’m not a conference gal. Give me a silent chapel over a stadium full of people singing praise any day. And honestly, I’m already all in on the Eucharist. So while I knew God might do something marvelous, I went to the congress to give, not to receive.
Isn’t it funny how we think God can be outdone in generosity?
From the moment I arrived, I was overwhelmed by the feeling that this was a foretaste of heaven. I ran into people from every era of my life, including a friend I hadn’t seen for 22 years. It was one cry of delight after another as I saw the religious sister I used to drive to daily Mass when we were both in high school, the younger sibling of one of my favorite students from my days as a teacher, and the youth minister who walked with me when I was in the first flush of my conversion.
How heavenly to join tens of thousands of worshippers in utter silence as we adored the Lord in a stadium far more used to cacophony than stillness. How heavenly to sing hymns together, chant together, and cry out in praise and worship together. How heavenly to raise our voices in English and Spanish and Latin and Tagalog and Malayalam. How heavenly to worship in the Latin Rite, the Byzantine Rite, the East Syriac Rite.
But the moment I hope I never forget came during Saturday’s Eucharistic procession.
A beautiful bride
Again, I’m not a procession gal. I pray better sitting still. I love that there are processions and I’m so glad other people enjoy them, but I typically watch a procession for five minutes and then go in to make a holy hour. That was my plan on Saturday.
But oh, did God know better.
I walked out into the streets alone but soon found some dear friends — everywhere I turned, it seemed, were people I loved. And as we watched the first communicants go by at the beginning of the procession, I smiled. I smiled at the thousands of religious sisters and seminarians and deacons and priests. I smiled at the bishops, many of whom were grinning at their people. I smiled at Jesus as he drove past.
And then I watched the laypeople. And I wept.
Friends, I love Jesus desperately. I love the Eucharist. And I have been holding tight to the Church as a truth-telling institution. But over the past six years or so, I’ve been having a really hard time loving the Church. What with yet another abuse scandal and the horror of complicit clergy and racism from the pulpit and division and incivility and the cruelty and callousness I’ve seen cloaked in the language of faith, my heart has been hardened, to the point that all I wanted to say (in the words of a friend) was, “Jesus, you better get down here and deal with your bride.” I’ve been begging the Lord to keep me in the center of his heart, and I’ve been trusting that such closeness to him will hold me fast in his Church, but it has been hard. For years.
But on Saturday, I watched his bride walk by. And she was radiant, clothed in glory.
The bride of Christ was filled with joy and hope and wonder and also more than a little exhaustion. She was six months old and closing in on a century, riding in a stroller and on a scooter, using crutches and a wheelchair. She was every race and age and political persuasion.
I stood by the side of the road and wept. For 45 minutes I wept, watching the bride of Christ walk by. She sang in Latin and English and Spanish and Vietnamese, in chant or with guitars or beating on drums. I saw chapel veils and tank tops, large groups of teens from the Bronx and large groups of children with their overwhelmed parents. And every single one, from every imaginable demographic, was following after Jesus.
God is good
There was nothing particularly striking about any of them (except, perhaps, the Indigenous teens in traditional garb dancing the whole way with bells strapped to their ankles). But I think the Lord gave me a glimpse of his bride as he sees her: already radiant but not yet immaculate. A bride made up of every tribe and tongue and people and nation. It’s the only explanation I can give for my astonishment at thousands of ordinary people: He let me see just a sliver of what he sees. And it was stunning.
This weekend, I saw priests racing to hungry people, their chasubles flapping behind them as they brought the Eucharist to a station where the previous priest had run out. I saw bishops weeping for gratitude over the work of the laity. I saw sisters sitting on the street to talk to people experiencing homelessness. I saw preschoolers with hands lifted in prayer, volunteers with supernatural patience, parents with screaming kids receiving nothing but encouraging smiles. I saw the Church, and I remembered just how much I love her.
Somewhere along the way, without quite noticing it, I had begun to doubt. Though I believed in the truth of the Church, I had begun to doubt her goodness and her beauty. But this weekend, my sweet Jesus looked at my hardened heart, so sure it was in need of nothing, and offered me a little miracle that might just be what shores me up and sustains me for years to come.
I can’t wait to see what he does at the next Eucharistic congress. I can’t wait to see the fruits of this one, building through the months and trickling down through the years.
My goodness, but God is good.
