The Power of the Holy Eucharist
What's your story of encountering Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament?
I was raised Bad Catholic. We were (at that time, no longer the case) the people who never went to Mass, the ones whose children showed up for First Communion prep, skated through doing the bare minimum, and were rarely seen again once the sacrament had been acquired. But let me tell you: I loved Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.
I knew so little about the Catholic faith that once I got into an argument with a Jewish friend over whether “Catholic” and “Christian” overlapped, and I can’t remember what it was I was so fervently insisting, but I remember later learning that she was the one with the accurate information.
And yet. The Eucharist. If I showed up someplace to do the Catholic? It owned me. I spent a couple decades doing variations on Very Bad Catholic, but through all that, even in the depths of my pagan phase, if I was around the Holy Eucharist I could not help but love it, and hunger for it, and cherish it.
I loved it so much, and counted on it so much that God used my disconnection from Him in the Holy Eucharist to pull me back into the faith. I was touring one of the historic mission churches of San Antonio which was still an active parish. I stepped into the building, reverent, sufficiently in awe of where I was, acutely aware of the lit candle over the tabernacle indicating the Eucharist was present, and therefore I fully expected to feel the presence of Jesus in the church.
I didn’t.
It felt like just any other building.
A beautiful, solemn, quiet building, but only a building. I had entered absolutely ready for the inevitable full-onslaught feeling of the sacred Presence that I had until that day always felt in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, and instead I felt nothing.
Nothing.
Nothing at all.
That big fat nothing was the shock that knocked sense into me. I knew in that moment that I had gotten myself into big, big trouble. You can only push Jesus so far before He starts getting serious with you. This was serious.
And thus began my circuitous path back into the Catholic faith.
Today is Holy Thursday, when we solemnly observe the institution of the Holy Eucharist. We remember that beautiful, terrifying night when Jesus cleared up so many mysteries by giving us the Sacred Mystery.
What’s the story of your relationship with Jesus in the Holy Eucharist? Today’s a good day for remembering and telling a piece of that story.
Here’s one of my favorite pieces of Last Supper art, by 19th century sculptor Théophile Klem. Photo by me, taken in July 2017 at the church of Saint-Léger in Munster, France (where the cheese comes from).