Woodlands
Monday 7 November 2005

WHY WRITE THIRSTING FOR GOD?

I suppose I should begin by saying what was in my mind when I wrote Thirsting for God and why I thought it would be useful for people to reflect on it. We all live busy lives that do not leave much room for reflection. Pope John Paul pointed out in some of his writings that we are all in danger of being overwhelmed by all the things that press in on us, all the priorities, all the anxieties, all the pressures, and all the information. The human mind, he said, ‘has wilted under the weight of all so much knowledge and little by little has lost the capacity to lift its gaze to the heights”1. In another place he pointed out that in all the constant noise and activity we have become unable to be silent ‘for fear of meeting ourselves, of feeling the emptiness that asks itself about meaning”2.

This seemed to me to be an important pointer to one of the challenges with regard to the Eucharist. When we arrive at the Church for Mass, filled with all that noise and all that pressure and all that information, how possible is it to tune in to what is happening? Is there a danger that, instead of seeing all of these things as distracting us from the central truth of our lives – which the Eucharist touches directly – we will rather think of the Mass as a kind of distraction from what we might be inclined to think of as ‘real life’ in ‘the real world’?

The truth is that the Eucharist touches the core of ourselves and of our lives. But it touches us at that deeper level which we tend to avoid, ‘for fear of meeting ourselves’. The problem is to make ourselves aware of the hungers and thirsts which the Eucharist promises to satisfy. As I reflected, it seemed to me that the Eucharist itself challenges us to be aware of these hungers, and in fact it intensifies them.

UNSATISFIED HUNGER

We are accustomed to thinking about the Eucharist as the Food which satisfies all hunger. The words of Jesus the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel are very familiar: “No one who comes to me will ever hunger. No one who drinks me will ever thirst” (Jn 6:35).

It struck me, however, that we also need to reflect a little on a text which appears to say the direct opposite. The Book of Sirach says: “They who eat me will hunger for more; they who drink me will thirst for more” (Sir 24:21).

Those words, although at first sight they almost contradict the passage in John’s Gospel, say something which is also true of the Eucharist. Perhaps they express an aspect of the truth which is particularly important for us today. They complement the words of St. John’s Gospel in much the same way as the New Testament statements about the Kingdom of God are complementary. In some places it says that the Kingdom of God is already present in Jesus. Jesus began his preaching with the words, “Repent, for the Kingdom of heaven has come near” (Mt 4:17). In other places the Gospel describes the Kingdom as something that has still to come. Jesus taught his followers to pray, “Thy kingdom come” (Mt 6:9, Lk 11:12).

The two aspects do not contradict one another; in fact they reinforce each other. The fact that the Father’s Kingdom has come in Jesus in no way diminishes the desire for its definitive establishment. In fact the opposite is the case: the belief that the Messiah has already come, is already drawing the world to himself, heightens and intensifies the desire to see creation brought to its goal. Hope is strengthened by the presence of Jesus Christ who is “the joy of all hearts and the fulfilment of all aspirations”3.

So, our efforts to make a more human world are not in competition with the firm hope that God has already begun to establish the new creation, where all things will be made new. In fact that hope intensifies rather than diminishes the longing. Vatican II put it like this in a passage that is worth reflecting on:

We have been warned, of course, that it profits us nothing if we gain the whole world and lose or forfeit ourselves. Far from diminishing our concern to develop this earth, the expectation of a new earth should spur us on, for it is here that the body of a new human family grows, foreshadowing in some way the age which is to come. This is why, although we must be careful to distinguish earthly progress clearly from the increase in the kingdom of Christ, such progress is of vital concern to the kingdom of God, insofar as it can contribute to the better ordering of human society.

When we have spread on earth the fruits of our nature and enterprise – human dignity, sisterly and brotherly communion and freedom – according to the command of the Lord and in his Spirit, we will find them once again, cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured, when Christ presents to his Father an eternal and universal kingdom ‘of truth and life, a kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace’. Here on earth the kingdom is mysteriously present; when the Lord comes it will enter into its perfection4.

The Eucharist is the presence of that future, the presence of the Goal of human life. At the same time it is meant to heighten our desire to share finally with the Risen Lord when he brings everything to its perfection.

We are part of the affluent world, though it does not always feel like it! And that, of course, is part of the problem – what would seem like unimaginable luxury for people in many parts of the world is seen as hardship for us. They couldn’t even imagine sitting in a traffic jam in their own car not worrying about the petrol that was being wasted, or turning aside for a moment from a running tap without turning it off.

We are people whose need is not so much to be freed from hunger as to feel the hunger which only God can satisfy. We need to feel the restlessness and the incompleteness which modern living often silences so effectively. We need to hunger for more and to thirst for more than consumerism and materialism have to offer. We need, in a way that may not have been true of less affluent generations, to understand the Eucharist not only as the Living Bread which satisfies but as the Bread that makes us hunger for more.

HUNGER FOR THE ABSOLUTE

In the first place, the Eucharist arouses a hunger for the absolute. It is a sign of the ultimately unsatisfying nature of the nourishment that this life offers. Life is unsatisfying, not because it is evil, but because it is good.

It is good, but it is impermanent -- nothing lasts forever. It is good but it is vulnerable -- everything is threatened by death, illness, our own sinfulness and the sinfulness of others. It is good but it is imperfect -- even the most generous love is marred by selfishness; even the most noble cause can be perverted.

Distortions begin to happen when we become so absorbed in seeking good things that we blind ourselves to the imperfections which are present even in the best things. That is why nothing on earth is capable of satisfying the unlimited aspirations that are within us:

In this creative restlessness beats and pulsates what is most deeply human -- the search for truth, the insatiable need for the good, hunger for freedom, longing for the beautiful and the voice of conscience5.

The Eucharist is our contact with Christ, the first born of the new creation. In that new creation, we will find a goodness which is permanent, unthreatened, perfect: a goodness which can fully satisfy our hunger.

That goodness will not be something alien or inhuman. It will be the solidarity, freedom, dignity and achievements of human history, “cleansed this time from the stain of sin, illuminated and transfigured”.

The Eucharist, therefore, faces head on the inability of even the greatest human goods to satisfy us; it is the presence of the One who alone can fulfil all our aspirations. We are created and redeemed for something greater than the world can offer and our hearts are restless until they rest in God. But the Eucharist reminds us of the inadequacy of all that we rely on precisely in the context of the hope that is entirely reliable and stronger than any evil or weakness or disaster.

So the Eucharist, far from turning us away from what is good in human life, is a sign and promise of the fact that all that is good in our lives and relationships is called to live forever, transformed and perfected, vindicated and flourishing. We are called to pass from death to life in Christ. The process of drawing humanity into that endless life has begun. That is what we celebrate, that is what is present, in the Eucharist.
ANSWER TO SECULARISM

The increasingly secularist character of our culture means that this truth is not easily grasped. It is the very opposite of secularism. The secularist, even when not excluding the religious question altogether, wants to keep God in his place.

The hunger which is celebrated in the Eucharist is not confined to certain areas of life, to holy times and holy places. It concerns every nook and cranny, every relationship, every decision, every achievement. There is nothing that is secular in the sense that it has nothing to do with God and with the meaning of our lives.

The deepest reality within every person, at every moment and in every situation there is a hunger which can only be satisfied by being with Christ, risen from the dead, in the life he now lives with his Father. Even in what seem to be the most trivial situations, that is the fundamental truth about each of us. The real challenge to living the Gospel and the fundamental tragedy of our times is that this hunger is so often suppressed, so often unrecognised, so often dismissed.

Whatever the appearances, it is as Pope John Paul said, “impossible to eradicate completely the sense of God”6. But that sense can be pushed almost completely beyond the horizon of people’s concerns.

The unease, the restlessness, the powerlessness, the disillusionment and the quiet desperation of much of modern life cannot be ignored. That unease breaks out in all sorts of ways from drugs to social disintegration and individual despair. But the real meaning of these feelings can be suppressed. They can, in fact, lead people to conclude that there is no meaning to life and for that very reason to avoid, so far as they can, looking into what they fear may be dark and empty depths. The only escape is to live on the surface of things.

The real meaning which the Christian message shows us is that this restlessness and unease are “the groans that cannot be put into words... the prayers that the Spirit makes for God’s holy people” (Rom 8:26,27). In that light, instead of being a recipe for hopelessness and disillusionment, human restlessness becomes a sign of the greatness of our hope, reaching out to a destiny that eye has not seen nor ear heard.

But first we have to experience and recognise the hunger and the pain. Fr Ronald Rolheiser –who writes in the Irish Catholic, reflects on our celebration of Mass. He says that we sometimes talk as if the problem was that people are not celebrating enough, that they don’t show their joy and thanksgiving. There may be some truth in that. But we remember Jesus at the Last Supper, loving his companions at the table, certainly; full of thanksgiving to his Father, certainly; but also full of anguish and longing and fear at the prospect of an appalling death. We do not appreciate the joy he promises unless we recognise the horror, the overwhelming disaster and humiliation that the promise of God overcomes. So perhaps, he suggests, the real truth is that,

What is wrong generally is not that people do not sing and dance, but that they do not break down. There is too little anguish in our Eucharists7.

It is right that we should express our reverence for the Eucharist by keeping our churches and our vestments and our altar linens spotless and in good condition. It should not lead us to forget that what is present to us at Mass is the horror of Calvary, which was a scene of blood and agony and desolation, of ugly prejudice and cruelty.

In the Mass, Christ’s passage through that dreadful death to new life with the Father is made present. In Communion and in worship of the Eucharistic Presence, we are touched by the core of the new creation, by the God who is both the source of and the answer to the prayers which are too deep for words, the prayers that, like the prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, can face any disaster.

There is the essence of the challenge that faces us: how to awaken a sense of this hope which is too big for a matter-of-fact world to grasp which was big enough to triumph in the hopelessness of unjust and devastating death. We need to find a language and a way of life which will reveal the joy and the human richness and the power of Christ’s promise which is what we seek in all our longings, though we rarely recognise it.

We do not need to suppress our hopes and damp down our desires in the cynicism which believes that “everything in life is six to four against”, that “if something can go wrong, it will” and that “blessed is he who expects nothing for he shall not be disappointed”.

We need rather to open people’s minds to the realisation that we are made for something greater, that the trouble with our hopes is not that they are too big but that they are too small. We really begin to understand our hopes and longings when we begin “to grasp the breadth and the length, the height and the depth, so that, knowing the love of Christ which is beyond knowledge, [we] may be filled with the utter fullness of God” (Eph 3:18).

In other words, we need to be stretched in order to receive the fullness of God. St. Augustine puts it like this:

Suppose you want to fill some sort of bag... You know how big the object is that you want to put in and you see that the bag is narrow so you increase its capacity by stretching it. In the same way by delaying the fulfilment of desire God stretches it, by making us desire he expands the soul, and by this expansion he increases its capacity.... That one syllable [God] contains all that we hope for... Let us stretch ourselves out towards him so that when he comes he may fill us 8.

The Eucharist is not a kind of motorway services area into which one pulls aside out of the bustle of the real world in order to refresh oneself. The Eucharist is at the very centre of the real world. It is the Reality which alone gives meaning to the chaos of human lives and human history. It is not a lay-by; it is the Road: He is the Way. Anything which does not in some way share in the truth made present in the Eucharist is at best a lay-by and at worst a road that speeds one in the wrong direction, away from the destination.

The mythology of consumerism promises wealth and prestige, comfort, fitness, success. But it is a mythology that blinds. As Rolheiser puts it: “When we stand before reality self-preoccupied, we will see precious little of what is actually there to be seen. Moreover, even what we do see will be distorted and shaped by self-interest.... Our sense of reality shrinks accordingly...”9.

That is why reflection on the Eucharist is a good test of the authenticity of our faith. This is the heart of what we are about. The temptation in a secularised world is to get on with the “bits” of the Gospel that “work”. We can speak of good neighbourliness and decent moral standards and these are certainly required of the followers of Christ, but such qualities can easily coexist with attitudes that shrink our sense of reality. They have their own value and may be a way of opening a person up to the Good News. But we must be clear: evangelisation properly speaking is about awakening and addressing the hunger for absolute fulfilment. It is about the hunger which only God can satisfy.

Here is where we have to find the antidote to secularism. It will not be found in condemnations or in coercion. It will be found in seeking the Truth which is richer, more satisfying, more liberating, more human, more worthy of our wholehearted commitment and effort than anything else. Hunger for that truth is what can be awakened and deepened by the Eucharist -- they who eat him will hunger for more.

The answer to the one-dimensional, impoverished worldview of secularism will come from people who are “steeped in the truth which comes from Christ”10. It will come from people who really believe what the Eucharist shows us: that, in Christ, no ambition is too high, no hope is too great. The Eucharist shows us a hope which gives a whole new dimension to our understanding of ourselves. When we look at ourselves in the light of our redemption in Christ, as Pope John Paul put it in his first encyclical, we are filled with deep amazement at human worth and dignity11.

HUNGER FOR JUSTICE

The second aspect of the hunger that the Eucharist arouses in us is a hunger for justice. In fact, if that hunger is not aroused, Pope John Paul said, our celebrations are not authentic:

We cannot delude ourselves: by our mutual love and, in particular, by our concern for those in need we will be recognized as true followers of Christ (cf. Jn 13:35; Mt 25:31-46). This will be the criterion by which the authenticity of our Eucharistic celebrations is judged.

The first reason for this is that in the Mass we celebrate what humanity is called to be in Christ. The unlimited giving of himself in his broken Body and flowing Blood is the standard for our treatment of each other: “Love one another as I have loved you” (Jn 15:12). The second reason is that, in celebrating the Eucharist, we are recognising that this unlimited love of Christ is given to all of us together. We are all equally in need of his love. We are ‘co-heirs with Christ, sharing his sufferings in order to share his glory” (Rom 8:17).

The Eucharist makes present the Body of Christ. He is present as Head of the Body in the person of the celebrating priest. He is present in the congregation. He is present in his Word. But above all, he is present in the consecrated Host and Chalice, truly present under the appearance of bread and wine..

At the same time, that presence builds up the Body of Christ which we are. St Augustine says that when the priest says “The Body of Christ” and the communicant answers, “Amen”, he or she is not simply saying, “Yes, I believe that It is the Body of Christ”, but also “Yes, I believe we are the Body of Christ”. Augustine says, “You are saying yes to your own mystery”12 , in other words you are saying yes to what you are. As the Synod of Bishops in 1995 put it:

Communion with the Body of Christ in the Eucharist signifies and brings about, or builds up, the intimate union of the faithful in the Body of Christ which is the Church.

Celebration of the Eucharist commits us to that union with the rest of the human family in the building up of the Body of Christ. It commits us to recognising that our sharing in the peace of and unity of God’s Kingdom depends on how we treat the sons and daughters of God. By celebrating the Eucharist, we are expressing our readiness to share with all of those who ‘will come from east and west and sit down with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob at the feast in the kingdom of heaven’ (Mt 8:11).

But that is too comfortable a way of putting it. It is not just a question of our readiness to share with all of our brothers and sisters of all races and religions and social conditions, but of whether they will be willing to share with us.

Union with God in the new creation can be entered only by those who can be recognised as brothers and sisters, only by those who have served Christ in his brothers and sisters and who will be welcomed by Christ in their name: “As often as you did it to one of the least of these, you did it to me” (Mt 25:40).

If there are those who have good reason to believe that we have not been their brother or sister, then the Eucharist is a judgement on me. That was what Jesus said quite bluntly: “When you are offering your gift at the altar, if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first and be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift (Mt 5:23,24).

UNIVERSAL JUSTICE

Once again, we will never appreciate the greatness of what we celebrate in the Mass unless we first look our longing for justice, and our fears that life is ultimately unjust, in the face. Otherwise we are caught in smaller hopes, which we know in our hearts are unreliable and insufficient. The justice to which the Eucharist points is the divine justice which exceeds anything we can imagine. Anything less than what Christ offers will never fully satisfy our longings for peace and justice.

One cannot finally make sense of human life if one has to admit that life could have had no meaning for even one human being. Yet, down the centuries, and still in our time, millions of people have lived short, pain-ridden, oppressed, miserable, hungry lives. Most of them are entirely beyond our help because they are dead. Millions of human beings were still born or aborted or died shortly after birth. Only God can offer vindication or meaning to those who suffered through the generations. There is nothing we can do for them except to pray to God for them.

And God does offer a vindication and a hope which is big enough to face any pain or loss. God offers dignity and hope to the living and the dead: God’s justice is:

…a finally perfect justice for the living and the dead, for people of all times and places, a justice which Jesus Christ, installed as supreme Judge, will establish13.

In every Mass we proclaim that we are waiting in joyful hope for the coming of that kingdom. Do we really believe that? Do we have a joy that is the fruit of some grasp of the vastness of that hope?

THE DESTINY OF THE HUMAN FAMILY

The new creation, which we touch in the Eucharist, is the fulfilment of our relationship with all of our brothers and sisters. It is a vision so rich and so full of promise that we will spend our lives only on the fringes of it and glimpsing the wonder of it. As St Paul puts it, “Now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face” (I Cor 13:12). We will see clearly only in the kingdom prepared for us since the foundation of the world.

One of the great advances in our world has been in the sphere of communications. We can see, on our television screens places we will probably never visit; we can see and hear people we will probably never meet, whose culture and language seem strange to us. We can see disasters like the Asian tsunami, or Hurricane Katrina or the earthquake in Kashmir, almost as they happen – hardly anything occurs in the world that is not captured by a camcorder.

We can also see people in all the richness of their cultures; we can see the landscape which is home to them. And we can travel to places that we would never have dreamed of visiting a couple of decades ago. Many of us can remember a time when a family member going to Australia or even the US would mean that it was far from certain that they would ever see Ireland again. Now we have a much more immediate picture of the scale and variety of the human family.

We cannot even begin to imagine all of that family, gathered around God our Father and Christ our Brother, united by the Spirit who is God’s infinite love. What will it mean, in God’s house, when all these people, in all the variety of their individual personalities, their experiences, their cultures, their gifts, will be at home together? Everything that they bring will be part of the wonder of God’s creation, which we will rejoice in and share. We will see all of it as part of our family history.

When a person goes abroad, learns the language, the customs and the history of another people, comes to feel at home in a new culture, he or she acquires a fresh perspective on the world, including a whole new appreciation of what is distinctive and valuable in his or her own culture. This can enable someone to grow enormously as a person.

That is a tiny glimpse of the kingdom of God, where all cultures will be at home, and all of us at home in them. The art, the struggles, the achievements, the courage, the generosity of individuals and societies will all be part of the richness of our Father’s house. That vision expands our horizons leaves us realising the vastness of the promise of God.

When we add the dimension of time, we realise that we are not talking just about the achievements of this era in history. We are talking of every human achievement of every age, past, present and future, from the person who invented the wheel or who drew the first picture to people who will, one day, perhaps, explore the stars.

But that is not all. We know from sad experience that every one of these personal histories and achievements and admirable qualities is flawed and impermanent. The noblest ideals fail, the greatest generosity is flawed, the most outstanding achievements can be misused; the most perfect relationships are subject to the fear of illness and to the parting of death.

We will find in our Father’s house the huge variety of human gifts and achievements, but we will also find those gifts and achievements, free from every limitation, flourishing and blossoming in ways we cannot imagine. We will see in each of those people a unique image of our God. We will rejoice in each gift and each good fruit as if it were our own:

Eternal life consists in the joyful companionship of all the blessed, a companionship which is full of delight; since each one will possess all good things together with all the blessed, for they will all love one another as themselves, and, therefore, will rejoice in one another’s happiness as if it were their own, and consequently the joy and gladness of one will be as great as the joy of all14.

That is the universal, eternal companionship for which we are made and for which we long. The Eucharist is a celebration of that union between humanity and God and that complete companionship among human beings.

I have painted a picture there, a very inadequate and limited picture. And yet I suspect that most of us when we reflect on it will realise that it resonates with something within us. We do long to share with all our brothers and sisters in that harmonious sharing and celebrating all the gifts that God has given to our human family. And we do recognise that in doing so, we will also be recognising the vastness of God’s goodness, because each of those gifts, cultures, achievements etc. is in some sense a reflection of the Creator.

One way of opening up our horizons to this vision of the new creation is to face the depths of our own need for belonging, for meaning for hope and for purpose in life. Then we may begin to be open to a truth which would fulfil these beyond anything we could imagine or achieve for ourselves. That was what I was trying to do in Thirsting for God.

+Donal Murray
Bishop of Limerick