August 24, 2003

Visited by God

President Bush has never visited me. Nor Pope John Paul. Cardinal Ratzinger doesn't make house calls.

This is to say that it is typically not within our experience to be personally visited by important and powerful people, let alone the King of kings and Lord of lords. Anything not within our experience is more difficult to ascertain*, obviously. So it might be a stretch to believe that Jesus visits us, body, soul and divinity, in the Eucharist.

But another way to look at it is this: National Geographic once did a story on the unlikeliness of the universe not imploding immediately. It compared the odds of a stable universe such as the one we enjoy to a pencil standing upright perfectly balanced on its point. So if we can accept from this macro-level a micro-level of care and concern, we can believe that God holds each of us together literally, our every cell, at every moment. In this consciousness of God, it then becomes more understandable that he would visit us bodily in our Communions.

I once wondered how can God be ‘specially present’ – isn’t he present always? Can’t we call upon him anytime in prayer? But then: "why cut off any pathway to my Grace? Would you tear down a road and expect me to build another?". Indeed the men on the road to Emmaus didn’t realize he was Christ until the breaking of the bread and their hearts were enflamed... The Eucharist is a perfect example of God's simultaneous majesty, in effecting an impossibility, and humility, i.e. the God of the universe in a wafer of bread.

* - Another reason why it so crucial that we love. For if it is not in someone's experience to be loved, it will be harder from them to believe God loves them.

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