This is the second of two articles based on recent lectures on the dimensions of the Eucharist by Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, president of Oblate School of Theology in December at the Oblate Renewal Center.
By J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
One reason the early Christians celebrated the Eucharist was that they were keeping vigil for what they anticipated was Jesus’ immanent return to earth, Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, told an audience of about 300 people during a December lecture series at the Oblate Renewal Center. He noted that people are always waiting for something to happen or someone to do something. The Eucharist cannot be understood outside of this concept of expectation.
“We spend about 98 percent of our lives waiting for something to happen or someone to arrive. We wait at bus stops, train stations and airports; we wait for television programs, and we wait for every season of our lives to end so another one will begin.”
“The gathering of a family and friends on the evening before a funeral is also called a vigil. It’s a way of waiting for the funeral together so life can begin again, and you need to be with other people to do this,” the priest said, adding: “Henri Nouwen said that very rarely do you have a fully pregnant moment in which you don’t want to be anywhere else or with anyone else. Usually, we’re at one place wishing to move to another one.”
The Mass, he said, was intended to be a vigil to help us as we wait together for Jesus to return and to give us something we cannot give ourselves.
Father Rolheiser said that four words make a kind of summary of Jesus’ whole message: receive, give thanks, break and share. “The word eucharist is Greek for gratitude or thanksgiving.
“It’s important that you receive Eucharist; you don’t take it,” he said. God gave Adam and Eve a vast number of things for their pleasure, but he told them that if they ate the fruit from one tree, they would die. The point of the story is that gifts must be given, not taken.”
The priest also told of a hunter in Africa killing two animals and then discovering a hungry African boy was following him. When the hunter tried to leave one of the animals for the boy, he couldn’t understand why the boy wouldn’t take it.
But when the boy held out his hands, waiting for the hunter to give it to him, the hunter finally understood.
“A gift that’s taken out of your hands (without being given) is not a gift. There’s also a sexual metaphor involving rape. If sex is given out of love, it’s life-giving; if not, it’s life-taking,” Father Rolheiser said.
The priest said that the summary of all commandments is that each of us must stand before the world in a posture of receptivity.
Father Rolheiser spoke of a former Benedictine monk who said he had resented being required to ask his abbot’s permission for such simple things as buying a new shirt when other grown men were buying houses, cars and many other things they wanted.
But finally, he came to realize the wisdom of treating goods as gifts and not possessions.
“It’s all a gift. That’s the cardinal rule of nature,” the priest said.
Gratitude, Father Rolheiser, said, is the basis of all other virtues, and love itself is a consequence of gratitude.
The priest quoted the poet T.S. Eliot, who said, “The last temptation and the greatest treason is to do the right deed for the wrong reason.”
“The holiest person in the world is the most grateful one, with no angle, no manipulation and no jealousy,” Father Rolheiser said. “If a good deed for others doesn’t come out of gratitude, it always comes with manipulation.”
“Somebody else is carrying the cross, and you’re paying the bill. If you carry somebody’s cross, don’t send them the bill,” he said.
Father Rolheiser said liberation theologian Gustavo Gutierrez admonished people in the developed world not to come to the third world to live in poverty out of a sense of guilt for all they have.
“He said, ‘Instead of importing your guilt to us, if you can be happy and grateful for what you have, then you can come. But don’t come out of guilt and anger.’”
Father Rolheiser said that Mother Teresa sent away volunteers from the first world if they came to work with her in Calcutta out of a sense of guilt. “Mother Teresa was grateful,” he added.
Breaking and sharing, Father Rolheiser said, are about renunciation and sacrifice.
“You break your own life, your own agenda and your own wishes to do for others as Jesus did for us,” he said. Sharing is about community, openness and pouring out your life for others.
He cited Sister Helen Prejean, CSJ, the author of the popular book, Dead Man Walking.
“She grew up in privilege. She acknowledged, ‘I’ve been given a lot, and I want to give something back.’” She first worked in a slum in New Orleans, but after exchanging letters with a Death Row inmate at the Louisiana state penitentiary, she began a new ministry, both to condemned killers and to the families of murder victims.
The Eucharist also serves as “a prodigal’s sacrament of reconciliation,” Father Rolheiser said.
He said that the significance of Jesus changing the water into wine at the Cana marriage feast is often lost on modern Christians.
He said such Scripture scholars as Father Raymond Brown, SSS, have said that the significance is that the water he changed into wine was wash water. “When you entered someone’s home, you first had to ritually wash your hands and feet because they were usually covered with dust,” the priest said. “Jesus replaced something old — wash water — with something new — the Eucharist.”
Father Rolheiser said that our sins are forgiven at the Eucharist because to touch Jesus is to be healed, even of sin. He referred to a homily that St. Augustine preached to people about to receive their first Eucharist. Augustine said that the Lord’s Prayer is always recited before receiving the Body and Blood of Christ because in our human frailty, we sin in various ways.
“If perhaps such things have been kept in because of temptation and the fragility of human life, they are washed away by the Lord’s Prayer at the moment when we say, ‘Forgive us our trespasses’ so that we can safely approach the sacrament.”
But that in no way diminishes the importance of confession, Father Rolheiser said.
Again, he used a Gospel story to illustrate: the story of the woman with hemorrhages who was healed after merely touching Jesus’ cloak.
“She didn’t have to talk to him to be healed. But there were actually two moments of healing in the story: the moment when she touched his cloak and the moment when he asked who had done it and she confessed that it was she.”
“The Eucharist is the hem of Christ’s garment. The Lord’s Prayer is the great penitential rite, even though we have another penitential prayer at the beginning of each Mass.” But if this is so, people ask, why is confession necessary?
While people’s presence can speak of their penitence, the moment is not finished until explicit words of apology are spoken. “Mature people always apologize, in both words and action,” he said.
“There can never be full healing of one’s past until one faces one’s sins with searing honesty and tells them, face to face, with another human being.Explicit sacramental confession is indispensable to the process of full reconciliation,” he said.