I discovered how the elevation of the Eucharist takes away fear. It didn’t happen to me; it happened to my son. I was the witness of this marvelous deed. Here’s the story.
My wife and I were sitting with our children at dinner one night in the early months of 2017, and my kids started talking about things we might do when we drove out to the East Coast in the summer. They talked about visiting Civil War battlefields, seeing huge buildings in New York, maybe even seeing “the ocean.” (As someone who grew up in California, on the beach, realizing this particular poverty of kids raised in the Midwest pained my heart!)
Before long, their interest turned to Washington, D.C. Our older two kids — preteens at the time — were really revving up the excitement about going to our nation’s capital. They talked about the monuments and historical sites. They loved this idea, and their then-5-year-old brother, Josiah, was getting jazzed because they were jazzed. He was into everything they were saying, just buzzing with enthusiasm. Then, almost in passing, one of the older kids said that maybe we could even go to the White House. And immediately, Josiah’s excitement stopped. In fact, he froze. The color washed out of his face.
My wife and I noticed the sudden change that had come over Josiah. We tried to communicate across the table without speaking, but after a couple minutes, when it was obvious that something was really wrong with our little guy, I went with him into another room to see what was going on.
He said nothing at first, but it was clear that there was something wrong. I asked him if somebody said something at dinner that bothered him — he nodded yes, reluctantly. Thinking back over the conversation, I asked him if it had something to do with the White House — again, he nodded yes. After several minutes of gentle reassurance that he could tell me, he said that he didn’t want to go to the White House because he’d heard someone say that “The president of the United States is going to destroy the world.” He was 5 years old; he wasn’t expressing any kind of political opinion or bias. In his childlike imagination, he’d heard something scary and he feared it. He didn’t want to go to the White House because someone said that the man who lives there is going to destroy the world.
God comes to us
My first instinct was to tell him that the president was not going to destroy the world, but I didn’t say that. After all, if any single person could actually destroy the world, it would be whoever holds the most powerful office in the world. (I definitely didn’t say that to him!) I also felt like the most important thing to do was not to try to diminish the reason for his fear but rather to give him something to do with his fear and thus try to increase the reason for his hope.
I also knew that my wife — who was then running a Catechesis of the Good Shepherd atrium in which Josiah participated — had helped him and his older siblings to develop an eye for and an imagination about the symbols of the Catholic liturgy. My response, therefore, was to ask him a question: “Josiah, who holds the whole world in his hands?”
I was pretty confident — thanks in no small part to a VeggieTales jingle — that he would say what he said: “God.” I told him that no matter what, God will always hold the whole world in his hands.
“And you know what else?” I said. “You know when we go to Mass and the priest holds up the bread — the Eucharist?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Well, that is God’s love coming into the world. When we go to Mass, we can look up there at that moment and see God’s love coming into the world.”
He smiled, and even giggled.
I told him that especially when we are scared, we can look up at that moment at Mass and see God coming to us; we can see his love coming into the world. Even when we are scared, he will come to us. And we can see it. In fact, as I told him, we could see that happen at Mass on Sunday. I asked him if he wanted to see that, and he said he did. That thought unfroze him enough — even making him laugh a little — that we could go back to the dinner table.
When we went to Mass a few days later, I nudged him just as the priest was raising the host. I said, “Remember — that’s God’s love coming into the world.” He smiled and giggled again.
Even without making the case, my hope was that he could learn to see every terrible thing that might happen in the world in light of that one central action: God’s love coming into the world. And what I saw with my own eyes is that, on the night when he was afraid, even the thought of that elevated host was enough to bring a smile to his terrified face. Then at Mass, I saw him see the Lord coming toward him, which he believed was good news in the midst of his fear.
Raising up what scares us
What we as Catholics believe about the Eucharist is a truly remarkable thing: God’s love comes to us as the body and blood of Jesus under the appearance of ordinary bread and wine. Our God comes to us. He pierces our world at each Mass. He gives himself over into our hands, upon our tongues. It is amazing to think about and believe in this very thing happening, over and over again, daily, all across the world.
But there is something else that is fairly remarkable, though admittedly less spectacular. The other remarkable thing is that God waits for us to bring him bread and wine. He takes what we give him, and in return offers us his only begotten Son. It is remarkable to think about God waiting for us. There is no Eucharist without our meager gift of bread and wine.
When Josiah looked up to that altar and saw God’s love coming into the world, what did he see? Beautifully and thankfully, he saw with the eyes of faith the gift of Jesus Christ. He saw and believed that that truly was God-with-us, coming to us.
But he also saw, in a very ordinary way, bread, just as he would see wine. That means that he — and I — saw what we had brought to that altar. What I have come to understand more fully since that day is something that I only intuited earlier: The reason I didn’t want to dismiss or quickly take away Josiah’s fear is that I knew, somehow, that he was supposed to do something with his fear. He was supposed to give it over to the Lord.
It mattered, in the end, that he went toward the altar, that he showed up as the one who was afraid, and that, with my help, he somehow showed that fear to the Lord. The bread and wine that were carried to the altar as our congregation’s meager offering included Josiah’s gift of his own fear. It was a gift precisely because he brought it to the Lord, which is what the Lord wants of us: to bring him what we have.
Josiah was 5. He wouldn’t have been able to explain it like this then, and he probably wouldn’t be able to explain it like this now. But what I have seen and believe is that his own fear was lifted up over that altar and, through the mystery of God’s love, transformed into the gift of confidence. God responded to Josiah’s gift with the gift of his only begotten Son, who is our confidence in the midst of very darkness.
In the Book of Numbers, the Israelites are beset by fiery serpents, whom they fear. They bring their fear to the Lord, praying that “he take away the serpents from us.” And so, as we are told, Moses prays for the people, and the Lord responds by telling his servant to make a sign of one of the fiery serpents, so that any who is bitten but sees it shall live. “So Moses made a bronze serpent, and set it up as a sign; and if a serpent bit any man, he would look at the bronze serpent and live” (Nm 21:7-9, RSV).I give thanks to God that when my son was bitten by fear, the Lord showed us how to bring that serpent to his altar. Having received that gift, the Lord’s priest lifted up that serpent as no longer venomous but the very source of healing: the love of God Incarnate. The exalted Eucharist was — that day and every day — the antidote, lifted high so we may see and believe and receive.
