“…these words are the presence of the living God, the presence of Jesus Christ in our midst, and thereby they tear the world free from its unbearable boredom, indifference, sadness, and evil. ‘This is my Body, this is my Blood…’”
— Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, God is Near Us
My first visit to a Lutheran divine service was utterly enchanted. Though my reading in the months leading up to that visit had certainly primed me with an acute receptivity to the so-called smells-and-bells of high church, I also felt as though the liturgy scratched an itch I’d carried my whole life, like I’d walked for years with a rock in my shoe that I could finally take out. Much of this was aesthetic, no doubt, but let there be no mistake about the fact that aesthetic betrays substance. Falling in love with the liturgy was my first step in falling in love with the doctrine of real presence.
As I began to more seriously investigate a theology of the sacraments, it became more glaringly obvious that, if the presence of Christ to His people in the Eucharist is substantial, then liturgy is the only appropriate way to participate in that presence. Formality, literally the strictures of form, are, far from the stereotype of sterility and indifference, the safeguards against sacrilege. When one undertakes a matter of great risk, like skydiving, it is not appropriate to forgo formality, even in the name of greater enjoyment. Enjoyment will be utterly soured if tragedy should strike, and the strict adherence to formal protocols ensures that safety will ultimately enhance rather than hinder the proper enjoyment of the activity. The apostle Paul makes clear that the Supper is likewise a matter of life and death (1 Cor. 11:30). How much more important it is to guard the relationship of one’s soul to God than the safety of one’s body!
And this is exactly the nature of the Supper, and the train of logic by which I arrived at the inevitability of the real presence. If the Supper is a symbol (which a doctrine of real presence does not deny), then it is fitting to relate to it as to the thing it represents. Therefore, the consecrated elements should at least be treated as if they are Christ’s body and blood. Further, seeing as this symbolism is one established by God’s divine decree rather than man’s arbitrary whim, it is necessary that the symbol properly embodies that which it represents. Hence the meaning of “covenant,” that is, that Jesus institutes the Eucharist as the place, the mode, and the means of our relating to Him. How we relate to the Eucharist is how we relate to Him because it is Him.
There is more to love of Christ than the mere idea or notion or mental remembrance of Him. Indeed, the idea that He died on the cross and rose again cannot save, only the reality can. As Paul says, if the Resurrection is not a reality, “you are still in your sins and your faith is in vain.” Faith is not the mere cognitive apprehension of certain truths. If grace is not real — solidly, tangibly real — then faith is of no use.
So often a “personal relationship with Jesus Christ” is spoken of as a purely abstract mental construction, consisting entirely in how one thinks of and feels about Our Lord. But Jesus did not leave us to flounder chasing after the wind. He’s given us the Blessed Sacrament as the concrete instantiation of the relating of the whole person, body and soul, to Him. Just as in the New Testament’s choice metaphor of marriage, the marital covenant does not consist merely in words, feelings, or ideas. It consists in the becoming “one flesh,” the bodily embrace, the nuptial union. “For, as it is written, ‘The two shall become one flesh.’ But he who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit with Him.”
This union with God does not entail a union which precludes the body, as if it were something less than marriage, but it is rather a more total union, encompassing body and soul. We must resist the materialist inclination to imagine “immaterial” as meaning “inconsequential.” In fact, “spirit” refers to that which is more totally substantive than mere material. Thus Paul says also of the body in 1 Corinthians 6, before the aforementioned verse, “And God raised the Lord and will also raise us up by his power.” The end of theosis is not the body’s obsolescence, but its resurrection and glorification.
So, the Christian need not fear a theology of the sacraments that brings human flesh and divinity into intimate union, since that is exactly what the Incarnation and Ascension of Our Lord effect. The Eucharist is an incarnational reality oriented toward the final Resurrection. It is, by virtue of the hypostatic union, the most intimate participation of creation in the Creator. Christ confers that participation upon the elements so that through them He might confer that participation upon us, mediating His uncreated glory to us through the created substance of His own incarnate flesh and blood. As Aquinas said, it is the removal of the barrier of fallenness which ordinarily prevents perfect union between creation and Creator, that prevents “this from being that.”
In this light, it is important to note that, just as the nature of spirit does not preclude the earthly but rather encompasses it, so the transformation of bread and wine does not eradicate them, but enhances them. They do not become Jesus’ body and blood as opposed to food and drink, but become “true food” and “true drink,” becoming more truly themselves than they were before. This, again, is concomitant with the teleological reality of the human being, who in being united to God does not lose her identity, but gains it fully. As Brett Salkeld puts it, in a natural context the telos of bread is to be digested and therefore to have its substance transformed into the substance of the body. The end of all bread is to become body, and it finds that end most fully in the Sacrament.
But, in the end, it was my heart which first learned to love the liturgy, it was beauty in which truth came so wonderfully arrayed that first led me to know this truth more fully. So, for the reader still skeptical that the theological or philosophical substance compels any commitment to the real presence, I’d submit an aesthetic appeal. I’ve written at length (even ad nauseum) of late about the importance of fantasy as a gateway into deeper reality, and with that sentiment in view it is a great shame that so many Westerners today only read fantasy through the lens of “escapism,” loving to toy with realms reminiscent of the premodern imaginary recreationally, then with a resigned sigh putting them down in defeat, bemoaning that such worlds can only be lived in mentally. Imagination is let off the leash to run free for a time before cold, passionless reason comes along chiding that we know better now than our ancestors, that faeries aren’t real, that the world is all dead, unanimated matter. But the imagination only returns to its rationalistic cage reluctantly, always looking longingly between the bars and yearning for the time it might run free again.
This captivity of the imagination leads to despair, in the end. It cultivates a navigation of the world premised on a sense that all that is wonderful is only a pitiful narcotic for the blistering meaninglessness of material reality. It trains the imagination to think of itself far below its rightful station, demeaned as a clown, a useless and blissfully stupid purveyor of falsehoods for the sake of naïve or self-deceptive comfort. It generates an abusive relationship to fiction as mere distraction, therefore engendering that very reality. Stories become sugary, insubstantial confections for a gluttonous and depressed mind thus sinisterly inoculated against the very medium of meaning and hope. Imagination is dismissed as mere diversion.
But George MacDonald taught me what C.S. Lewis was trying to say all along. Imagination is a sense of the soul, more potent than sight. We do indeed reach an age at which we are too old for fairytales — before we reach an age at which we are old enough for them again. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is not the kitschy, overly-sentimental, wistful reminiscence about the idylls of childhood make-believe that its critics have often misunderstood it as. The whole point is that Narnia is real, and that Lucy’s imagination is not a distraction, it is a guide. Her childish faith allows her to accept the deeper symbolic, iconographic realities unfolded through the wardrobe that her too-rational older sister proves ultimately unable to grasp.
If by now I sound like a broken record, it is only because I finally feel old enough for fairytales again. I’ve come back to Narnia after so many years and remembered that it was real all along. The excitement of that experience is so rich and the beauty of it so indispensable that I can’t help but want to share it. Here I am, reduced again to a babbling child overawed by things beyond his wildest dreams, drowning in the eucatastrophe, doomed to fail in conveying its wonder with words, dragging his reluctant older siblings by the hands and urging them to come and see for themselves what he has seen. All is better than reason could ever dare to hope.
But, in order to mitigate the clamor of zeal in hopes of effective persuasion, I will attempt to conclude this appeal as sensibly as my excitement allows. That feeling you get from a gripping work of fantasy — that numinous yearning for its reality, that ineffable rapture we call enchantment — it is a hunger for something that is actually real. In fact, that feeling is only a glimpse of the far greater wonder of real life. The “real world” is not the dreary blur of drudgery modernity has exerted great effort convince you it is. And here, I find the restraint of reason can only fail me. I’m flailing my arms with all the jubilant frustration of a little kid to tell you that it’s all real! There are faeries, there are magic wardrobes, there is a deep magic.
I can’t describe it any better than I’ve already, pitifully, tried. I can only beg you to come and see what I’ve seen. Take a chance, even just a leap of pragmatic, Petersonian faith. Treat the Sacrament like what it represents — no metaphysical commitments required. Just imagine it’s real, pretend it could be true, and watch what happens.
“Yet I find no difficulty in believing that the veil between the worlds, nowhere else (for me) so opaque to the intellect, is nowhere else so thin and permeable to divine operation. Here [in the Eucharist] a hand from the hidden country touches not only my soul but my body. Here the prig, the don, the modern in me have no privilege over the savage or the child. Here is big medicine and strong magic.”
— C.S. Lewis, Letters to Malcolm
I owe a great debt of gratitude to Nate and Tim, who graciously contributed to the arena in which I could formulate, challenge, and develop my own thoughts on this subject, and in so doing perhaps played a part in those joyous strains beyond human orchestration.
Being Kindled 
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