The associated reading for this reflection can be found in your Every Sacred Sunday Mass journal or online here.
Living in a country where the Catholic Church is banned and Catholics are barred from openly practicing their faith, I developed a deep devotion to Christ in the Eucharist while being denied access to the Mass and Holy Communion. The only time I get to receive the Eucharist is when I visit my in-laws who live in a neighboring country where there are Catholic Churches or when I go home to visit my own family in California. Between these visits, I subsist on daily spiritual communions. My daily utterance of the prayer’s opening sentence, “My Jesus, I believe that You are present in the Most Holy Sacrament,” has stirred a knowing deep within my soul of the simple reality that every consecrated host is Jesus’s actual flesh and blood. Prior to my prolonged separations from Jesus in the Eucharist, however, the utter simplicity of this reality was often lost on me.
Like the Jews in today’s Gospel, I questioned much about the Catholic Church and her teachings. As a historian of Latin America, I encountered the darker side of the Church’s history both in the region and beyond through my academic training. My historical knowledge of the Church left me plagued by contradictions and doubts that confused my faith in Christ and in His mystical body. When subjected to my mind’s historical reasoning, the reality of who Jesus is and what He does for us in and through the Eucharist became increasingly hard for me to digest. Like the Jews, I quarreled with myself saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And yet, as graduate school grew more and more challenging, I found myself attending Mass more and more frequently. I realize now that what drew me to mass each Sunday was not a cognitive awareness of Christ in the Eucharist—it was my heart’s simple need to eat.
I was hungry for true food and true drink, and Christ, in turn, was hungry for my salvation. Sunday after Sunday, my hungry heart led me to Mass, and Jesus, because of who He is, fed me even when I was far from worthy that He should enter under my roof. Jesus knows how poor we are and how wretched we can be, and still, He wishes to enter into the depths of our misery in order to change our lives into His. And the primary means through which He does this is the Eucharist. “You are what you eat,” goes the old adage—and it is precisely by eating the flesh of the Son of Man and drinking His blood that we begin to have divine life within us. Looking back now, I realize that it was the simplicity of my heart and not the acuity of my mind that brought me to Wisdom’s table each Sunday.
“To the one who lacks understanding,” says Wisdom in today’s first reading, “Come, eat of my food.” While my graduate classes may have satiated my hunger for knowledge of the temporal world, it was Christ in the Eucharist who nourished in me a knowing of the divine reality that lies beyond it. Host by host, He filled my being with His, transforming my interior life from something tepid and desolate into something fiery and fruitful. It took me moving to a foreign country where I have no access to the Eucharist to realize what Christ had been doing in my heart and in my soul over the course of all those Sundays.
As someone who no longer has the privilege of partaking in the Most Holy Sacrament each Sunday, I urge you, just as St. Paul does in today’s second reading, to live not as the foolish do but as the wise, making the most of the opportunity to receive Christ’s divine life into yours. Host by host, He will feed you and He will change you. Maybe you already know the type of change your soul is needing, or maybe you have no clue what your soul needs right now; but chances are your heart does. Your heart, like mine, has a simple way of knowing this truth: we are perpetually hungry for Christ, and Christ is perpetually hungry for us. Let Him feed you dear friend, and fill you with His divine life as often as you possibly can—for faithfully eating His flesh and drinking His blood simply changes EVERYTHING!
Melanie Peinado has a PhD in History from the University of California, Davis and is currently taking some time away from academia to be a full time wife and mama to two boys. She loves to read, learn, discuss, and write about her faith and spends whatever free time she gets taking online theology classes through the Avila Institute. Coffee shops, beaches, and good books are her happy places and she savors getting lost in them whenever possible.