Embracing and living the mysteries of faith

A favorite indie film of mine has a scene in which St. Thérèse of Lisieux counsels a struggling, stressed-out priest: “Embrace the mystery, and it is light. Just live the mystery. Don’t try to unravel it."

A mystery invites us to seek a solution so that we might understand it. Once solved, a mystery no longer qualifies as a mystery. But mysteries of our Catholic faith are different: they are beyond our finite human capacity to understand. We can marvel at them, try to grasp them, and attempt analogies to explain them, but in the end we must accept them on faith for the simple reason that God has revealed them through His Church.

We believe, for example, that the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit are three divine Persons in one God. Yet try as we might, our human intellects cannot conceive of this reality, the Blessed Trinity: we tend toward mental images of an Old Man, a Young Man, and a Bird, or we separate the divine Persons into modes or functions as if they were independent beings. We can’t wrap our minds around the mystery, yet we must believe.

The same is true of the Eucharist. We accept the Real Presence of Christ under the appearance of bread and wine. We may cite the Scholastic explanation of transubstantiation, the change that occurs at the consecration during Mass. The elements maintain their accidents (appearance and physical properties) but undergo a change in substance (the reality that lays beneath these appearances). They cease to be bread and wine but become the Body and Blood of Christ. We accept this in faith, but is it within our ability to comprehend? Many communicants, I suspect, conceive of Christ as present “in” the bread and wine, or of the eucharistic elements as merely symbolic of His presence.

The Eastern Orthodox have a valid Eucharist, but the Great Schism happened before the rise of Scholastic theology in the West. They believe in the Real Presence but do not define how the change takes place during the Divine Liturgy. They embrace the mystery as mystery. Jesus said it was His Body and Blood. That is enough.

We want to explain things logically, to appraise the evidence with our senses. But the consecrated bread and wine still look and taste the same. Our physical senses cannot perceive the Real Presence. Faith is necessary to bridge that chasm, as expressed in the hymn Pange Lingua:

Faith for all defects supplying,
Where the feeble senses fail.

It is good to contemplate the mystery of the Eucharist in an effort to grasp it. Above all, in an act of faith, we must recognize Christ’s Body when we receive the sacrament, as St. Paul indicates (1 Cor 11:29). If we truly embrace the mystery, we can do no other than to stand in awe before the Real Presence and profess our faith: “My Lord and my God!” 

GERALD KORSON is editor of Legatus magazine.