The hiding place of God and also the revelation place of God is the material world.
You don’t have to put spirit and matter together; they have been together ever since the Big Bang, 14.6 billion years ago. You have to recognize this momentous truth as already and always so. But big truth can only be understood on small and specific stages. The Eucharist offers microcosmic moments of what is cosmically true. It will surely take a lifetime of kneeling and surrendering, trusting and letting go, believing and saying, “How could this be true?” Even Gandhi said, “If I really believed what you believe, I wouldn’t get up from my knees.”
The only trouble is that many fervent Christians kneel before the Eucharistic Body of Christ but not the Human Body of Christ that Paul describes (1 Corinthians 12:12-26). In most of the first millenium, the church people were called the Corpus Verum (the true Body), and the Eucharist was the Corpus Mysticum (the mystical Body), which was exactly reversed in the second millenium. I find that very telling and even disappointing.
Remember, it is much easier for priests and congregations to transform bread than to actually transform people, and further, the bread is for the sake of the people and not an end in itself, as both St. Augustine (354-430) and even present Canon Law clearly teach.
Adapted from Eucharist as Touchstone (CD, MP3)
