The One Great Thing to Love
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
Leaving Lothlórien, the Elves bestow a number of gifts upon the Fellowship to aid their all-important quest to destroy the One Ring. Among these gifts is a kind of bread, which is unknown to them, but called by the Elves lembas or waybread, which has some peculiar properties. Its size and weight — thin and light — are disproportionate to its power to nourish, as even one bite can sustain a grown man for an entire day. By appearance it seems bland and stale, but its sweetness can last for many, many days. It is to be preserved and kept safe from being mixed with other foods within leaf wrappers and eaten only when all else fails. It is delightful to those of good heart; but by those who are corrupted by evil, it is utterly despised.
Of all the elements of Tolkien's deeply Catholic imagination, the relation between the lembas bread and the Eucharist is among the most clear and obvious. The Eucharist is not the bread of the Elves but, as Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote in the Sequence for this Mass of Corpus Christi, it is the bread of the Angels, given to us pilgrims striving toward heaven. In each small, fragile Host, under the appearances of meager bread, is present the entire Person of Christ, God and man; and each Host, which tastes hardly like anything, contains all sweetness within it: the sweetness of God's grace that is our nourishment, strengthening, and delight on our earthly journey. The Eucharist is handled and preserved with utmost care and set apart from every other food, reserved in tabernacles and not eaten within close proximity of anything else. Those who take Communion in the life of charity increase in every grace and heavenly blessing; and those who partake unworthily, Saint Paul teaches, eat and drink condemnation on themselves (cf. 1 Cor. 11:29).
My mind turns to Tolkien on this Sunday when the Church celebrates the Lord's Body and Blood because he understood something about the Eucharist that we could stand to recover for ourselves. You may know that the Church in the United States is at the midpoint of a three-year Eucharistic Revival, designed largely in response to a recent survey which found that 69% of practicing, Mass-attending Catholics do not believe in Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist. Now, I'll be honest with you: I have my reservations about the accuracy of that percentage. I'm no data scientist, but I have preached for five years in several parishes with a good number of homilies at least touching on the Eucharist and not once has someone confronted me on the Church stoop about my claims on transubstantiation. At the same time, I do think there is a problem — just not the exact problem some of the initiatives of the Eucharistic Revival are seeking to address. The problem is not that Catholics don't believe in what the Eucharist is (the Body and Blood of Christ). Nor is it that Catholics don't believe in who the Eucharist is (that Christ is fully God and fully human). No, the problem is simply that we don't care. Apathy, not heresy, is the great challenge before us. Heresy — wrong ideas — can be corrected by teaching. Apathy — coldness of the heart — requires a much stronger medicine.
Moses and Paul heed Israel and the Church this morning to peer more deeply into the mysteries they have received. This has less to do with imparting knowledge than it does about waking up their hearts. Moses recalls the many ways in which God has provided for his people through forty years' wandering in the wilderness: Remember! Do not forget! what the Lord, your God, has done for you: how he has fed you, given you water, protected you and guided you. Paul, meanwhile, writes to the Corinthians to remind them that the bread they break and the cup they share are nothing less than a participation — a partaking in the complete and perfect loving, saving action — of Christ. Both readings tell us that we should look upon the Eucharist as the fulfillment of all that we could ever need or want — and, if so, then we should approach the Eucharist with an awareness of our desires and the expectation of them being fulfilled.
In 1941, John Tolkien wrote a letter to his son Michael, who seems by context to be heartbroken and unsure of how to navigate the world of romance and of love more generally. At the conclusion of this letter, the father writes to his son these beautiful words:
Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves upon earth [...] by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man's heart desires.[1]
What Tolkien thinks of the Eucharist hinges on what Christ says of it in the Gospel: Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. Present tense: has eternal life. If in heaven our hearts will be at rest and all our desires sated, then the foretaste of heaven that is the Eucharist is where we ought to look for us to find now all that is promised us in eternity. If we can pull back the veil on the enigma that is ourselves and discover what, at bottom, we are really after in this life — romance, glory, honor fidelity, love, truth, justice, relationship, communion, and all the rest — then we can approach this wondrous Sacrament with open hands and open hearts to receive what the Lord desires to give us. Then, the coldness of our hearts will thaw, and we will run to the Eucharist as often as we can, finding within it all sweetness.
A few weeks ago, I was having a bit of a day and found myself on empty as I said the evening Mass. When I picked up the Host to consume it, I said to myself a short, heartfelt prayer, asking the Lord to give me what I did not have. And in that moment, I realized that that was something I had not done for quite a long time. I have said 1224 Masses since my ordination to the priesthood. I wonder how many graces I have left lying upon the altar that could have benefited the Church, the world, you, and me? I wonder how many times I have received Communion throughout my life without asking or expecting anything in return.
I'm certain a good many of you are holier than your priest, but if your priest who says Mass every day can miss the connection between what the Eucharist is and why it matters for his life, then I'd wager from time to time you can too. But on this feast of Corpus Christi, the Church points us all back toward the one great thing to love on earth: to love the Eucharist and in the Eucharist to find Love.
Homily preached June 12, 2023 at the Cathedral of Mary Our Queen
[1] Letter 43, to Michael Tolkien, 6-8 March 1941.