Usually we eat our bread “in the sweat of our face”. Of course, we recognise that our daily bread is given to us by our Father in heaven. We give thanks to Him before and after our meals for we know our work is of no avail without His grace. We know that everything comes from Him as a gift. It is by His gift that “the fruit of the earth and work of human hands” becomes bread on the family table for our children, and bread on the altar for the children of God.
Sometimes, though, God feeds us directly. To the people in the wilderness, He gave manna. To the Church on pilgrimage to the heavenly city, He gives the Body and Blood of Christ under the Eucharistic signs of the Bread and the Chalice.
The Manna really fed the Hebrews, whose only work was to collect it at the right time. It was food for the present life. They ate it and, eventually, they died.
The Eucharist does not normally feed our bodies for this present life – although there is a very small number of Saints who fed only on the Eucharist, like St Nicholas of Flue in Switzerland in the fifteenth Century. Nevertheless, it is the real food of our true life: the life of our soul which is fully alive when united with its Creator and Saviour; the life of our body which finds in the Eucharist a promise of its resurrection.
In a real sense, we are fed and more than fed for we are given an anticipation of what we call the eternal banquet. To be honest, I must tell you that this celestial meal will be a banquet without food and without drink. In heaven there will be neither English tea nor French wine. Don’t get disappointed too quickly, though. There will be plenty to be fed upon, far more than we can take and this will have no end, for we shall feed directly on God. We shall live by His life, from His life, for His life. We shall dwell in Him and He in us. This indwelling will take the form of a continual exchange. God will be our life, and we shall live in Him. We shall be His joy and He will be ours.
It is good to have this in mind when we approach the Blessed Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ. The Eucharist is much more like the eternal banquet than like our Sunday dinner. It is an encounter and an exchange, a dialogue of desires and gifts. Jesus gives Himself to us and, in His Spirit, we, too, give ourselves to Him, and through Him to the Father. We are met at the very root of our personality and we meet God Himself. Our Creator touches us in this very centre of our self which we cannot feel but which is the very place where are true ‘I’ exists. This is a loving touch which at the same time heals what is spiritually wounded in us and recreates us in the Spirit of the Risen Christ. God reshapes us according to the life of His Son in order to enable us to love Him in return and to ‘touch’, as it were, His own divine self.
From Mass to Mass, we are taught by God and recreated by His mercy which makes of us His children in the Only Son. The Eucharistic encounter enfolds entirely on a spiritual level. It is not to be confused with the inner peace which may accompany it. It is a very simple exposure of our whole self to our Creator, Saviour and Father. We are totally seen, touched and loved, and we are given the possibility of touching and loving the God we do not yet see, but in whom we believe. Here God’s Heart speaks to our heart in a language without words which our heart can understand perfectly and to which we may answer with the deepest silence of our soul – in simple trust, with hope filled with humble love.