Corpus Christi, B June 2, 2024
Fr. Alexander Albert St. John the Evangelist, Jeanerette
Last week, I spoke about “union” as if it was obvious that it was something everyone would want. Well, maybe it isn’t obvious to you. Maybe you aren’t sure what I mean by union and therefore aren’t sure why it’s something you would want to “will” for yourself or “will” as the “good of the other person.” What is union? Why do we want it?
A friend of mine shared a story with me about a young man who was a practicing Catholic all his life. Like many young men, he fell in love with a woman. After some time, they got engaged, did their marriage prep, and finally got married one beautiful Saturday. Like dutiful Catholics, they got up the next morning to attend Mass. They went up for communion and returned to their pew. Full of joy, the wife looked to her side and was surprised to find her husband weeping. Shocked, she asked him what was wrong, fearing that maybe he suddenly regretted marrying her. All he could say was “I finally get it… this is my body given up for you… my body for you, his body for us. I never realized.”
Fr. Champagne likes to share another story about when he went to anoint a woman in the hospital. He found her sitting silently in the bed. As he approached to begin the ritual, he heard irritated grunts from behind him. Her husband was sitting in the corner of the room and Father had just blocked his line of sight. Stepping out of the way, the man and his wife settled comfortably and continued to simply look at each other. He performed the anointing and bid his farewell, realizing that they weren’t talking to each other, just looking. That was enough.
That one always reminds me of St. John Vianney and the farmer. One farmer went into the Church every morning on his way to the field and every evening on his way home. Once, the priest stepped in to observe what he did inside only to find the man sitting silently for a few minutes. Finally, St. John asked him “what do you do when you come in here?” The farmer simply said “I look at him, he looks at me.”
Lastly, a slightly different story. The Carthusians are an order of monks in the Catholic Church, one of the most intense religious orders in the world. In the early 1900s, one English prior, Dom Edmund Gurdon sent two of the younger brothers to dig a grave for a newly deceased monk. After a little while, the two burst into his cell with great excitement holding a tool with blood on it. He feared an accident, but they excitedly reported that, while digging a new grave in the cemetery, they found a body already buried in that spot – a Carthusian monk from many, many years before. When the tools hit his body while digging, it began to bleed as if alive. All of his clothing and even the grave marker had rotted away and he was definitely dead, but his body was incorrupt – a miraculous sign of this forgotten monk’s holiness.
Union. Each of those stories is a small encapsulation of what we mean by union between people and union with God. Marriage is the greatest natural sign and reflection of this union, one that Jesus raised up to supernatural status by making it a sacrament. The farmer and the Carthusian are a more direct reflection of it that union with God.
When I talked about loving someone by trying to unite them to God last week, it should have started to seem like love and union are almost synonyms. To love someone is to seek union with them. This is patently obvious in the love and desire we see between man and woman. It’s obvious to the point that often make the mistake of reducing all love to that form. Rather ironically, this extreme reduction of love to a… particular kind of intimacy breeds extreme counter-reactions. Some want to extend that very physical sort of union to relationships other than man and wife, arguing it’s okay because it’s about love.
Others, rightly appalled by the disorder that that brings, go too far to remove the body from the equation, saying things like “love is about souls,” or “love can’t be restricted by our bodies.” So they reject their bodies, try to escape from them, or even try to change them to fit their own idea of love rather than learning to love with the body they have.
That Carthusian example is important here. This man spent most of his life denying his bodily desires: fasting, sleeping on the floor, long hours kneeling or standing in prayer, practicing celibacy. And yet, the union with God through all this did not escape his body, it did not bypass it or trivialize it. No, this unitive love made his body more relevant, not less. Paradoxically, by giving up his body in a life of prayer and penance, he actually saved his body from death and decay.
Yes, union with God is a spiritual reality. Yes, when we die, our souls and bodies are separated. But no, we are not angels. We are not pure spiritual beings who unite with God only as souls. To show us this, our Triune God took on a body – the Son became man – and then quite literally gave his body to us as the primary way to be united to him. This is the feast we celebrate today – Corpus Christi – the Body of Christ. The Eucharist – Jesus’ body, blood, soul, and divinity – is made truly present to us and united to us when we receive communion worthily through the very bodily action of eating and drinking. I say “worthily” on purpose. If the man in the first story had committed adultery on his wedding night, he would not have seen the deeper reality and if the Carthusian had been unfaithful, his body would have rotted away. His mercy makes us worthy, but only if we repent, believe, and obey. If the doctrine of the Trinity is perhaps too abstract and spiritual for people to relate to, then the doctrine of the Eucharist is often too concrete and physical for people to accept. But both are true. Both are foundational in what makes love… love. To love as a human being made in God’s image is to accept ourselves, body and soul, as we are. It is to strive for spiritual union with eternal, transcendent Trinity in and through our bodies. Bodies with ears that hear, faces that express, hands that serve, knees that bend in prayer, and sufferings that cry out for more. Bodies that, despite their brokenness and imperfections, can give physical and spiritual life not by rebellion against but by cooperation with their design. Bodies that, by receiving God hidden in the form of bread and wine, find the strength to become what they were always meant to be: instruments of love and bearers of eternal glory.