Corpus Christi : 2 June 2002

A detail from a painting by Giovanni Cimabue, in the lower level of the Basilica at Assisi.

The National Shrine of Saint Francis of Assisi in San Francisco

Homilies from the National Shrine
of Saint Francis of Assisi

CORPUS CHRISTI
The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ
2 JUNE 2002

[Deuteronomy 8:2–3, 14–16; 1 Corinthians 10:16–17; John 6:51–58]

WHEN I WAS still a teenager, I discovered Flannery O’Connor, and, in a short period of time, she became a very great favorite of mine. Some of you, doubtless, are familiar with her writing, and you may, like me, admire her craft. The part of her fiction that most fascinates me, then and now, is what many critics referred to as “the grotesque,” but what she herself called “the reasonable use of the unreasonable.”^[1]

A modest example comes to mind. In a short story called “A Temple of the Holy Ghost,” a young girl, thinking about martyrdom, pictures it as a kind of happy sleeping with lions. This child talks back to her mother and mercilessly taunts her older cousins, who aren’t clever enough to understand the sophisticated ridicule. Nonetheless, she does have some genuine religious conviction and tries sincerely, if awkwardly, to pray. O’Connor writes about this precocious, but sassy, child: “She knew she couldn’t be a saint, but she thought she could be a martyr if they killed her quick.”^[2] At the end of the narrative, the girl receives an enthusiastic embrace from a nun at her cousin’s convent school, and the crucifix from the nun’s belt gets mashed into her face so that the child’s very body is henceforth imprinted, if only for a short while, with the cross of Christ, the “ultimate, all-inclusive symbol of love.”^[3] Later, as she is traveling home in the car with her mother, the setting sun appears like a great red ball, but she sees it as “an elevated Host drenched in blood” leaving a “line like a red clay road in the sky.”^[4]

In a letter to a friend of hers, O’Connor would later write, “…like the child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not just a symbol. If the story grows for you it is because of the mystery of the Eucharist in it.” In that same correspondence, O’Connor relates this awkward experience:

I was once, five or six years ago, taken by [Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Hardwick] to have dinner with Mary McCarthy…. She departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went and eight and at one, I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me in such company to say…. Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them. Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [McCarthy] said that when she was a child and received the Host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the “most portable” person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, “Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.” That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.^[5]

All the rest of life is expendable. A well-known evangelical preacher, it may have been Billy Graham, famously remarked that he wished he could get Protestants to believe in their own salvation with the same fervor that Catholics believe in the Real Presence.

There is, of course, something entirely preposterous and, well, unreasonable, almost grotesque, about the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence. We claim, with a perfectly straight face, to eat the body and drink the blood of the Eternal Word of God, the second person of the Most Holy Trinity who, according to some, shouldn’t even have a body to begin with. But therein lies precisely the most outlandish feature of the Eucharist: namely, that it embodies the essential scandal of the Incarnation itself.

The Gospel of John begins with the observation that Word became flesh and dwelt among us (Jn 1:14), and continues to explore the startling implications of the Incarnation throughout the Gospel narrative. This year, on the Fourth Sunday of Lent, we heard the lengthy Johannine discourse on the man born blind (Jn 9: 1-41) to whom Jesus gives the gift of sight. That gift of sight, which allegorically is the gift of faith, has terrible consequences for the man: he is thrown out of the synagogue, the only spiritual home he has ever known. At that point in the narrative, Jesus reappears to the man and asks him whether he is ready to believe in the Messiah. “Who is He, sir, that I may believe in Him?” the man who been born blind asks. Jesus says to him, “You have seen Him, and it is he who speaks to you.” The man who been born blind says, “Lord, I believe,” and then he worships Jesus (Jn 9: 37-88). Bear in mind, it’s one thing to recognize in Jesus the fulfillment of the Messianic expectations of Israel; it’s quite another thing to leap to the conclusion that the Messiah is in fact God Himself, the Creator who has become part of His creation.

Now it’s important for us to remember that the man was born blind, not stupid. He certainly knew the commandments, especially the first and greatest commandment, that you shall love the LORD your God and Him alone shall you worship (cf. Ex 20: 5; Dt 6: 4ff; Mt. 22: 37ff; Mk 12: 30; and Lk 10: 27). No Jew, however marginal, would consider the remotest possibility of worshipping another human being as God, unless he had come to believe that the Son of Man standing before him were, in fact, the perfect revelation of the Almighty Father, the very One in Whom we see our God made visible so as to be caught up in love of the God we cannot see. The man who had been born blind was given the gift of sight indeed, for He sees beyond the flesh and into the very heart of the mystery of Jesus, Himself the sacrament of Man’s encounter with God. This is the scandal of the Incarnation: that the Eternal and Omnipotent Word of God should surrender His Divinity and take flesh so as to dwell in the milieu of sinful and unredeemed humanity as a weak, poor mortal, unremarkable except for the signs He performs announcing, albeit ambiguously, that the power of God is at work in Him.

It’s no wonder that the Galilean crowds said, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” The wonder is that we, like the man born blind, should bow down and worship Him; that we should raise our heads, if only for moment, from the sphere of our ordinary existence and see that elevated Host, drenched as it were, in the saving blood and say with Thomas, “My Lord and My God;” that we should perceive in the Eucharist the very center of our existence so as to proclaim with one heart and one mind that all the rest of life is expendable. That is the wonder, the mystery, the life and the love the we proclaim in this most Blessed Sacrament.

Friar Francisco Nahoe, OFM Conv.
THE NATIONAL SHRINE OF SAINT FRANCIS OF ASSISI
Pax Christi et bonum

1. Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose, Robert and Sally Fitzgerald, eds. (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1969).

2. Flannery O’Connor, “A Temple of the Holy Ghost” from A Good Man is Hard to Find (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1971).

3. Sally Fitzgerald, ed., The Habit of Being: The Letters of Flannery O’Connor (Vintage: New York, 1979) 124.

4. Ibid. O’Connor 1971.

5. Ibid. Sally Fitzgerald 124–125.