Last Sunday, we were trying to peek into the mystery of the Holy Trinity and – in order to do so – we had to resort to the language of metaphors, symbols and comparisons. I’ll leave it to you to decide whether my attempts were successful or not. But the need to use some tactile, tangible imagery proved it obvious that we are sensory creatures, and we need various stimuli to hit our sensors in order to make our brains work. Some studies have been carried out when individuals were put into sensory-deprived rooms. After a while, for lack of any external stimuli, they started to experience various hallucinations produced by their sensory-deprived brains. Although such experiments were carried out relatively recently, they scientifically described a phenomenon known to humankind since time immemorial. Exiles to remote, hostile areas or islands, old-fashioned prisons or modern-day solitary confinement have been the practical applications of sensory deprivation. The need for a near-constant stream of sensory information explains the unabating popularity of art in different forms and shapes. It also explains why every religion – no matter how austere its beginnings are – over time develops sensory-rich rituals that effectively become vehicles for expressing the inexpressible and for experiencing what’s intangible. As a cradle Catholic I had taken the richness of our liturgy for granted until the day when, several years ago, I attended a funeral service in the Church of Scotland and found it very austere. I’m not disparaging it – I’m absolutely sure that our protestant brothers and sisters, attending and enriched by Kirk services, are no less committed Christians than any other denominations. But that was a moment when I realised what I love about the Catholic liturgy: it appeals to all our senses and is interactive.
Our Creator understands that well. Although we are called upon to participate in spiritual realities, here on earth, we have this very deep need to hang on to something or someone palpable. The lack of that is the spiritual equivalent of a sensory-deprived environment. One of the threads weaving through the biblical Old Testament was an astonishingly stubborn return of the people of Israel to idolatry. The most well-known was the golden-calf episode. Moses had led the Israelites out of the idol-rich and sensory-rich environment of Egypt to the middle of the Sinai desert, to the bottom of Mount Horeb. Then he left for the mountain and stayed forty days and nights there while they idled leaderless in the sensory-deprived rocky desert. So, they created a golden calf and produced some rituals – that were an idolatrous equivalent of hallucinations. This tale is often told as a story of obstinacy and fickleness of the “born-again” Israelites, at which Moses went absolutely berserk. However, when his anger eased and subsided, he learnt an important lesson too, and as a result, he built a mobile, tented, sensory-rich temple with the Arc of the Covenant as its centrepiece. According to the Bible, that temple was always set up in the centre of the Israeli camp, providing a physical presence among the people in a literal sense and a reminder of God’s presence among them. Interestingly, the Bible claims that the entire design of that temple was God’s doing, shown to Moses on the holy mountain when he climbed it the second time.
Some would uncharitably say that Moses’ temple was an afterthought, a remedy created after the horses had already bolted. The New Covenant, Christianity, had the necessary tangibility in its design from the very beginning. The famous prologue of St John’s gospel presented in a very poetic way the ever-existence of the Son of God in His ethereal form: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God.” (John 1:1-2) But then the unimaginable happened: “the Word became flesh and lived among us.” (John 1:14) Jesus’ bodily, physical, incarnate presence was like Moses’ physical temple in the middle of the Israeli camp – a proclamation that God was with his people in a sensory-rich way. Before his arrest, passion, resurrection and return to the Father, Jesus took great care to leave his followers with a tangible presence for centuries to come. On the night of the Last Supper, he established the sacrament of the Eucharist, his presence in the tangible, sensory-rich physical form of bread and wine. Those two simple foods are transformed by the power of the Holy Spirit into the body and blood of Christ, the source of life, as we heard in today’s gospel: “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.” From the very beginning of the Church’s existence, this sacramental, Eucharistic presence of Jesus has been at the heart of spiritual life. It was reiterated by the Catechism of the Catholic Church that “the Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself.”
Consequently, the Church has always taught that Sunday Mass is a spiritual necessity, not an optional, skippable religious activity carried out at our leisure. Jesus himself warned us in today’s gospel: “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.” (John 6:53) When we disconnect from the Eucharist, we put ourselves in danger of creating our own idols – a spiritual equivalent of hallucinations. They might seem attractive, fulfilling, or entertaining, but what would they offer when life inevitably proves hard? In the first reading, we were warned by Moses: “Do not become proud of heart. Do not forget the Lord your God […] who guided you through this vast and dreadful wilderness, a land of fiery serpents, scorpions, thirst; who in this waterless place brought you water from the hardest rock; who in this wilderness fed you with manna.” Jesus then reassured us: “whoever eats me will draw life from me. This is the bread come down from heaven; not like the bread our ancestors ate: they are dead, but anyone who eats this bread will live forever.”
