The Eucharist: The Path to Self-Giving

I meditated on the importance of self-giving these past two days, so I assume it is to be expected that God showed me how weak were my musings. The following is a meditation I read this morning by Fr. Benedict Groeschel, one of my favorite living saints. I am humbled.


The Holy Eucharist: The Path to Self-Giving and Contentment
Experiencing The Mystery of Christ - (Meditation Twenty-One)

In the words of the great twentieth-century theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar, “The passivity of [Christ’s] Passion, with its fetters, scourging, crucifixion, and piercing, is … the expression of a supremely active will to surrender and for that very reason transcends the limits of self-determination into the limitlessness of letting oneself be determined.” (from New Elucidations)

What are we post-moderns to make of such strange words? A “supremely active will to surrender” is a blatant contradiction in terms to us. It is perplexing, disturbing. It is an affront. Active people never surrender. Passive ones do. And if there is one thing we claim to be sure of in our confused and confusing world, it is that constant activity is good. In activity we find our meaning. In activity we discover our worth. It is through activity that we triumph, that we achieve domination over others – an essential ingredient of life. But Christ, as always, teaches us new and deeper things about the meaning of human existence. In His Passion we are confronted with something we can’t comprehend: a will that triumphs through surrender. And – as if that weren’t disconcerting enough – we have a vague and troublesome suspicion that we’re supposed to imitate this in some way.

A self-giving active will, however, would not have been an especially difficult concept to those who came before us, to the generations of Christians whose faith was profound, whose lives were lived in the great mystery of God’s redemption of mankind. Such a will to them would simply have been one that had learned to be compliant with the movement of the Holy Spirit. For them, it was what we were all supposed to aspire to; it was that which would lead us to contentment.

Late in his life, St. Paul stated that he had learned to be content, implying that – even for a saint – arriving at this state involved a long process. If we are ever to come to the kind of contentment that Paul describes, we, too, will do it slowly, over long periods of time and in the midst of the fast-paced, sometimes chaotic activities of everyday life. This is a difficult journey, one beset by many obstacles. The world has always created barriers to true contentment, but the dramatically accelerated pace of present-day life can be so consuming that we forget that our lives have intrinsic value. We lose sight of the fact that what we do is distinct from what we are. Life is a pilgrimage that has as its destination eternity with God. It is this alone that gives meaning to our existence. For many people, including highly educated ones, however, all sense of life’s purpose has faded into oblivion. Human existence is understood as little more than a series of appointments and errands jotted down in a daily planner, a never-ending catalogue of obligations to discharge. In the world’s terms: we are what we do. To maintain our worth, to justify our very being, we must always be in the process of accomplishing something tangible. Life thus becomes drained of meaning and transformed into the senseless, endless task of Sisyphus who was condemned to push a heavy rock up a hill over and over again only to see it escape from his grasp at the last second and roll to the bottom again.

We must remember that the meaning of our lives transcends the material things we produce during them, that God has created us in His image, and that Jesus has given Himself on Calvary as our redeemer and continues to give Himself to us in the Eucharist until the end of time. The word “Eucharist” derives from a Greek word that means to be thankful, and in this word we find one of the keys to contentment. We must cultivate thankfulness to the God whose love knows no bounds. We must be mindful that we were created out of love and that at every instant our being is sustained out of love, that Christ gave His life for us out of love. The divine love does not depend on what we accomplish in this world or on how many possessions we accumulate, or what people think of us – it certainly doesn’t depend on whom we can dominate. It depends on what we are: beings made for eternity with God. St. Paul – the most active of saints – came to this understanding. He encountered the divine love in a dramatic way on the road to Damascus and then met that same love over and over again in the Eucharist. In this meeting, he discovered a deeper meaning to life than any he had previously known. As we enter deeply and meditatively into the mystery of the Eucharist, we comprehend more and more the fact that Christ offers Himself to us in Holy Communion despite our limitations, our failures, and our constant relapses into sinfulness. Our imperfections cannot limit His love. If we remember this, we will live in a way that more clearly reveals our true nature. Perhaps we might even surrender our will a little, become compliant with the movement of the Holy Spirit, and achieve the contentment of which St. Paul speaks. Who knows, we might even learn to give of ourselves to others in some small imitation of Christ.


Anima Christi

Soul of Christ, sanctify me.
Body of Christ, save me.
Blood of Christ, inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ, wash me.
Passion of Christ, strengthen me.
O good Jesus, hear me.
Within your wounds hide me.
Permit me never to be separated from you.
From the malicious enemy defend me.
At the hour of my death call me.
and bid me come to you,
that with your saints, I may praise you
forever and ever. Amen.