Face to Face: Mass and the Eucharist

We see, hear, smell, taste, and touch: it’s an essential way of interacting and understanding the world around us. One of the things which I love about the Catholic faith is the sacraments. Sacraments let us personally encounter God through tangible ways; they symbolize graces of God and are the graces themselves. The Catholic Church’s practice of the sacraments, as believed to be established by Jesus Christ himself (John 6:54 “EAT MY BODY”), is very considerate of the nature of humanity. As humans, we need help understanding abstract mind-blowing concepts like Jesus’ sacrifice, forgiveness of sins, and receiving the Holy Spirit.

Mass is the main liturgical form of Catholic worship in which the celebration of the Eucharist – the most important sacrament – takes place. It’s our version of Sunday service, but there is also daily Mass available. Take caution though, rumor goes that if you go to Mass too often and pray too much, you might end up in a religious order... The entire Mass is essentially a giant prayer, and what makes this prayer more powerful than any other is the presence of Christ coming down through the Eucharist, where we can encounter the true body and blood of Jesus through the bread and the wine. BadCatholic gives an excellent depiction on how important the Eucharist is to Catholics (that is, the ones who care enough about their faith).

            I’ve dabbled with some other Christian groups. I love their praise bands with catchy worship songs that get stuck in my head and I am easily moved to tears by powerful speakers, but I’m somehow always drawn back to the Catholic church where the old priest drones on about something (I wasn’t listening). No matter how good Protestant groups can get, they lack the one thing which I crave and need the most – a real, tangible, holy form of Jesus Christ, face to face. Nothing can beat the fact that I can be so close to Jesus – literally have Him within me when I eat the consecrated host – through the Eucharist. That’s why despite the sitting, standing, kneeling, and secretly texting throughout Mass, which even Catholics themselves may find mundane, I still go and it’s important to me that I go. Once Jesus is in the picture, everything else comes secondary, including boring homilies.

Pope John Paul II encouraged the members of the Church to go to Eucharistic adoration, in which the Blessed Sacrament (the host of the Eucharist) is displayed and you spend time with Jesus. It’s a very mindboggling and difficult concept. Some days I’m just kneeling there, looking at that wafer, thinking to myself, “That’s Jesus?” To be honest, I don’t think anyone will ever, through human capacity, fully understand how it exactly works. That’s why it’s called the mystery of faith. However, the sacraments – especially the Eucharist – begs us to ask more questions and explore deeper in the faith, rather than hastily taking in the host and washing it down with a mouthful of wine (which is now the blood of Christ!) and booking it before the long parish announcements begin. Even though today’s culture is focused on the presentation and people may not be inclined to attend something as solemn or old-fashioned as the Mass, I’ll bet that the beauty of the prayer and the hunger for Jesus will continue to draw in those seekers.

But really though, we could actually use a few jokes in the homily. Just to keep us awake until the liturgy of the Eucharist.