I will explore this final topic from three angles: first, the Eucharist and the spirituality of the parish; secondly, the Eucharist and an incarnational spirituality; and thirdly, the Eucharist and a paschal spirituality

The Eucharist and the spirituality of the parish

A parish is a special community or a special family in the making. It is not a family in the ordinary sense. A family in the ordinary sense is a community we discover that we belong to. It is not one we choose. Even when we disown our family or they disown us, we remain related by ties of blood. The family is not a voluntary association.

The parish, on the other hand, is not a community we belong to by ties of blood. We belong by being born of water and the Spirit. Thereafter we voluntarily decide to follow Jesus. The norm is adults freely consenting to be a community of believers, a community of disciples.

The family in the original sense has important roles or functions that can’t be duplicated. It is the primary place where we learn how to become human beings. Becoming human is not a self-taught thing. That’s the point of the myth of Tarzan, or the myth of the wolf-boy.

A boy brought up by wolves will only look human. In every other way, he will act like a wolf. Becoming a human being is the fruit of human instruction. But growing up well requires more than instruction. It requires love and nurture, and these are among the primary duties of the family.

The parish, on the other hand, does not exist in the first place to provide nurture. This does not mean that it must be cold or unfeeling; but the parish essentially is where we come together to listen to the Word, to be shaped by the Eucharist, and to be strengthened for our mission in the world.

Who comes together?  All different kinds of people. Not people, for instance, we would necessarily choose as friends. You sit down near whomever is next to you. The parish is not a community of ideological soul-mates.

It is a community of people who let themselves be shaped into people who love, i.e., people who bring to others respect, service, and help, if and where help is needed.

A loving community is not a given. It is an aim. It is the fruit of nurture through the Eucharist. The Acts of the Apostles gives us the impression of a perfect community in existence, united in mind and heart.

To some extent, what Acts presents is a snapshot. We have no idea how that community looked five years later, what divisions they had to overcome, who left and came back, who left with no thought of coming back, and so on.

A more realistic picture of the parish is the community of Jesus’ first disciples. They were different from one another in many ways, not only temperamentally, but also in terms of their visions of Jesus. They were also jealous of one another, and occasionally furious with one another. This is more like the ordinary parish than the picture you find in Acts.

One of the criticisms we hear about our parishes is that they are too impersonal, too cold, and too unwelcoming. Many parishes today have established “greeters”, whose function it is to have a word of welcome for everyone, and to look out for strangers in particular, to make them feel at home.

This is obviously very commendable. Warmth and intimacy should not be absent from relations in a parish. But – let us not forget - the parish is essentially where people learn to grow in the understanding and practice of love, including love for the enemy and the unlovable. This is the byproduct of greater love of God, not greater openness in human relations.

The genius of Catholicism has always included its “hoi polloi” character. James Joyce, the Irish author, put it this way: “To say catholic is to say ‘here comes Everybody.’” That is, here come all kinds of people, different colours, races, classes, politics, professions, and spiritual conditions. What unites them is where they are (not who or what they are), what they receive, and what they may become.

Eucharistic spirituality as incarnational

In the Eucharist, we commemorate the entire life of Christ – his life, death and resurrection, not just the time of his Passion. That life was thoroughly lived in a free identification with ours. Our life assumed special potentials because of that. A spirituality lived in this light will have certain characteristics:

It will not be based on an evasion of life or an evasion of one’s humanity. One’s humanity is something to be accepted. It forms the basis of respect for the humanity of others.
It will be a spirituality attentive to what is real. Because of the incarnation, the real is the spiritual.

 The spiritual is not a dimension added to the real. One does not have to “take flight” into the spiritual. The real, on the other hand, is not the “obvious”. You have to look well, look hard, test your experience, observe the experience of others, reflect, and distill – before you get some idea of the real in life.

One goes through the real. The Incarnation in its entirely is a “through” phenomenon. God entered into life. Jesus didn’t hop, skip, and jump over anything. He went through boyhood and manhood, through time, through events, through trials, through suffering, through death, and thence to resurrection. The Incarnation enshrines the spiritual principle that the way up is the way through.

The Incarnation also implies a spirituality of affirmation. All of creation, the entire cosmos, is affirmatively stamped with the approval of God. One does not begin by saying that reality is evil or human beings are evil. The world and human beings may fall into evil, but that means a fall from somewhere, from integrity, ideals, goodness, and so on.

The Incarnation means that we live in a world of value, not of brute facts. Value is not something added to reality. Reality is valuable to start with. As are we ourselves.

Eucharistic spirituality is also sacramental, i.e. it lives in a world where things signify other things, where earth can signify heaven, where bread and wine can signify the Lord’s body and blood.

Eucharistic spirituality means that flesh (and the dust to which flesh returns) is bound for glory.

Spirituality of the Eucharist as paschal

The Eucharist also commemorates the paschal mystery, that is, the movement or transition in the life of Jesus from death to life.

As enacted spiritually, the paschal mystery is the mystery of how we, after undergoing some kind of death, come into new life, how the movement from death to life is replicated in our own lives.  “Unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies...”

We must distinguish, first of all, two kinds of death: terminal death, which we’re all heading for, which ends our lives and all our possibilities, and paschal death, which is the death that ends one kind of life and opens up another, deeper and richer in form and content; and, secondly, two kinds of life, resuscitated life, which is this life continued – the life that Lazarus, for instance, resumed; and resurrected life, which is qualitatively newer and richer life.

Paschal spirituality is about paschal death and resurrected life.
Examples of this process stand out in different areas of every person’s life. In each area the temptation is to cling to the past, to the well known, the way Mary Magdalene clings to the old Jesus on Easter morning.

We must all endure the death of our youth. Western culture unfortunately prizes only youth. People therefore hold on to it as long as possible, and refuse to let go. The time comes however when all the cosmetics and plastic surgery in the world prove to be futile. Youth dies. But unless it dies, maturity and wisdom cannot be born.
 
Everyone also experiences the death of some of their dreams.  We never realise everything in life. We can hanker after what is no longer possible, what we may now never be, or never have, or let it go, and live the present in its fullness. The day of salvation, as Scripture reminds us, is always today.

We also usually suffer the death of certain ideas of God, the Church, and the Bible.
Everyone who has lived through Vatican II is familiar with this. But it’s also implied simply by growing up in faith, in ceasing to “think like a child,” as St Paul wrote, and learning to think like an adult.

In all of these instances and in others – the death of a loved one, for example, divorce, the experience of abuse - the way to life is the way of paschal death.