What does it mean to be a spiritual person? I ask that because when I talk to my nephews, nieces, and other relatives about going to Church they answer, “I’m a spiritual person but I’m not religious.” Which translates, as near as I can tell, as I have my own way of connecting with God that doesn’t include going to Church. Observing them I would say that a spiritual person according to this definition is someone who has moral values, who lives a good life and who realizes that there is a higher power at work in the world. All good things. But is it enough? I’m reminded of a story that might be apt for this Fathers’ Day. It seems that young Timmy was frightened one night during a big thunderstorm. Terrified, he called out from his room, “Daddy, I’m scared!” His father, not wanting to get out of bed, called back, “Don’t worry, Son. God loves you and will take care of you.” There was a moment of silence. The little boy said, “I know God loves me, but right now, I need somebody with skin on.” Today’s feast of Corpus Christi is a way of talking about Catholic spirituality as a spirituality with skin on.
Jesus is, after all, the presence of God with skin on. Because of Jesus when we talk about God we can no longer imagine that God is somehow or other above it all, out of the realm of ordinary human existence. The life of Jesus demonstrates that God has chosen to participate in our lives with a body, in all of our fleshiness. God is into our stuff. Hence, a Christian spirituality must reflect the embodied, the incarnate, the flesh and bones nature of God’s presence. Not for us a spirituality lost in the realms of the heavenly choirs and angel hosts. Not for us a spirituality found in secret texts and specialized knowledge. No, a spirituality which follows after the life of Jesus will of necessity include crying babies, dealing with refugees, working class families, repressive government, human suffering, grief and loss. Since those things characterized the life of Jesus, they will be a part of the life of the followers of Jesus. A spiritual person after the pattern of Jesus will be inserted directly into the nitty gritty of human life.
Which helps us to understand the feast that we celebrate today, the feast of Corpus Christi, the feast of the body and blood of Christ. Jesus knew that our life in God needed to stay grounded, needed to remain a part of the world that we experience. What better way to do that than to use the basics of life – food, drink, water, oil – as the access points into divine reality. In particular today, we have thrust in front of our nose the reality that we find God in something as fundamental as eating a meal. Jesus says in the gospel of God, “My flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.” The spiritual life of a follower of Jesus it to be found in the physical reality of human life. Each Sunday as we come to Church we participate in the very life of Jesus in the act of eating and drinking. “Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in them.” The characteristic of a Christian’s spiritual life is that it is embodied – not aloft on some spiritual plane above it all but part and parcel of the physical world that we know. Spiritual and physical, human and divine, heaven and earth. Receiving Holy Communion, therefore, is the merging of the world that we know and the world that is to come – life and eternal life experienced as not two distinct realities but as part of a continuum. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
The very physicality of the body and blood of Christ that is the Holy Eucharist serves as a vivid reminder that our spiritual life as Christians must take into account the earthly realm as the medium of God’s presence. Some of the implications of that include: first, that our participation in receiving the body of Christ in Communion is reflected in our participation in the body of Christ as community, as the Church. It is no accident that both the Blessed Sacrament and the Church are both referred to as the Body of Christ. The only authentic way to understand the gift of the Eucharist that Jesus left us is to become the one body we are meant to be. As St. Paul puts it, “because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body.”
Second, our spiritual life nourished by the Holy Eucharist involves us in an ongoing task of conversion, of transformation. I keep going back to the prayer of St. Augustine. When he would hold up the Blessed Sacrament he would declare, “Behold who you are.” Yes, our reception of Holy Communion makes us participants in the very life of Christ. The nourishment of the Sacrament becomes our very flesh and bones, as all food does. You are what you eat. But he would then add, “Become who you receive.” Our reception of Holy Communion makes a demand on us. Our actions and attitudes are to change in order to better reflect the reality of who we are and whose we are. We must grow into our true identity as the body of Christ.
Finally, a spiritual life nourished by the Holy Eucharist must remain in touch with all the hungers of the human heart. We understand that those hungers – physical hunger for food, for shelter, for safety; spiritual hunger for forgiveness, for consolation, for acceptance – all have a claim on us. Since we are nourished at the table of the Lord we must extend a hand in loving service to those clamoring in their need. The Blessed Sacrament is not our prized possession to cling to but a bounteous gift that is meant to be given away.
For a follower of Jesus our spiritual life must be concrete. The feast of Corpus Christi tells us the Spiritual life of a Christian has skin on.