Flesh and Blood

In yesterday's gospel (Jn 6:52-59), Jesus tells those quarreling about his message, "unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you."  The commentator (Living With Christ, p. 135) observes that when we say "flesh and blood" we refer to someone's real presence, his complete presence.

Jesus gives himself to us "flesh and blood," meaning completely.  To be present to another is to love; to love is to make of oneself a present.  To lose oneself in love, to find oneself in love, and to do so completely, totally, is the noblest human desire.  Friedrich Schlegel said that human beings are characterized by a "terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity, a feverish longing to break through the narrow bonds of individuality." (Quoted in Inventing the Individual, Larry H. Peer, Ed., in an article by Diane Long Hoeveler, at p. 7.)  It is a desire to overcome incompleteness, to complete oneself in an "other."

To realize a desire requires flesh and blood.  Simone Weil noted,"[h]uman nature is so constituted that any desire of the soul, in so far as it has not passed through the flesh by means of action and attitudes which correspond to it, has no reality in the soul.  It is only there as a phantom." (Cited in Ordering Love, David L. Schindler, at p. 280.)

The Eucharist, then, is Jesus' invitation to me, in flesh and blood, to imitate him in giving myself, flesh and blood, body and soul, completely, in love, "in remembrance of me," to others.  In acts of love, I live, in Christ's love for me.

Listen to "Taste and See"