Thought from retreat

Near the beginning of the day, our regional liaison for the charismatic renewal was sharing some thoughts from Pope Benedict's document on the current Year of Faith, and some other thoughts from the Holy Father's Ash Wednesday homily.  I'm not sure which of these was the source for the thought that caught my attention and resonated for me: the idea that the Eucharist is the summit of worship.  I know plenty of people who believe that social outreach ministry is a higher calling.

I'm sure I must have written before against a popular approach to our faith that has begun to dominate over the past century: that its chief value is in how it moves us to be a force for social change in the world.  In Catholic circles, the theology behind this thought is sometimes summed up very briefly in a very reasonable sounding idea, "The Eucharist is created for us, not vice versa." I had a former pastor,  whom I love dearly, who was fond of quoting this as he opposed any excesses, as he understood them, in Eucharistic adoration.  But there are a couple of truths which get mixed up in this misunderstanding, and of these, the first is probably the one that most gets at the root cause of the error.

It is the failure to fully understand that the Holy Eucharist is Jesus Christ.

Of course, it is ridiculous to suggest that any of us fully understands this.  Only when we participate fully in the heavenly banquet for all eternity will we begin to approach this level of knowledge of God.  Yet even understanding to the smallest extent that, in ways we do not fully understand, the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, leads us to understand that we were indeed created for the Eucharist - though not to meet His needs, for He has none.  And this is where those who use that phrase have it right, for indeed the Eucharist was instituted to meet our need for spiritual food.  Done right, worshiping the Lord in the Eucharist is a key element of eating his Body and drinking his Blood.  (More on which aspect of Christ's body was created/instituted for which in a bit.)

First, though, is the thing that this modern theology usually gets right when its adherents lament the practice of regular Eucharistic adoration (an objection which they have wrong, in most cases).  They point out that the traditionalists' emphasis on reverence for the consecrated elements in the context of the Mass often comes at the expense of a recognition that Christ is just as really present in the assembled Body as in the Eucharistic elements of the Body and the Blood.  They are often right about this, yet the one ought not come at the expense of the other.  In this sense, it is true that we and the Eucharist have indeed been created and instituted for each other.  According to God's plan for us, we do not become his Body - and individually parts of it - to the degree God intends unless we are fed by the spiritual food, in which Christ gives us himself as the nourishment we most need.

So my chief objection to the phrase as it seems (to me) to be misused is in its implication that the purpose of the Eucharist is to equip us for the social outreach that many mistakenly consider the "real purpose" of Christianity.   Indeed, this viewpoint holds that the chief purpose of our worship is to make us the best version of ourselves - itself a concept on which Matthew Kelly has written extensively that is worth investing our energy and effort into - so that we might go forth and do what we're really supposed to be about.  The truth of the matter is that we frequently put too little effort into the things that God might have us do, but the purpose of our relationship with God is not for us to do those things.  Rather, a relationship with God is the greatest good our lives will ever know, and inevitably when it is all that it should be it leads to our transformation - which is of course a good thing - and our social outreach - which is also a good thing.

And yet to say that our personal growth or our social ministry is the purpose of our relationship with God gets the two greatest commandments out of order.  Jesus said that the greatest commandment was to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength, and that the second is like it: to love our neighbor as ourselves.  Now, these two are inextricably linked for us, but their linking does not make the second commandment equal to the first.

Of course, God is love, and all who live in love live in God, and it is impossible to love God without loving our neighbor.  And if we love our neighbor rightly, we will enter more deeply into our relationship with God in the process.  So maybe this whole megapost is just an arguing of unimportant semantics.

And yet it seems to me that I see way more people lose their perspective on the truth by focusing on service of others and trying to let their spirituality flow from that than by focusing on worshiping God (though perhaps I've just been blessed by being around true believers).   Putting service ahead of worship puts us at risk of despairing over the injustice we perceive in our neighbors' suffering.  Worshiping first reminds us that God is God, and we, though his Body, are not God.  We are his presence in the world, yet in God's infinite eternity he remains greater than any finite collection of our finite minds can fathom. It is certainly possible to go through the rituals of worship without entering into a true relationship with God in the process, but then the lack of fruit - the absence of transformation and service - eventually becomes evident.