"I thirst."-John 19:28.
OUR Blessed Lord reaches the
communion of His Mass when out from the depths of the Sacred Heart
there wells the cry: "I thirst." This was certainly not a thirst for
water, for the earth is His and the fullness thereof; it was not a
thirst for any of the refreshing droughts of earth, for He calmed the
seas with doors when they burst forth in their fury. When they offered
Him a drink, He took it not. It was another kind of thirst which
tortured Him. He was thirsty for the souls and hearts of men.
The
cry was a cry for communion-the last in a long series of shepherding
calls in the quest of God for men. The very fact that it was expressed
in the most poignant of all human sufferings, namely, thirst, was the
measure of its depth and intensity. Men may hunger for God, but God
thirsts for men. He thirsted for man in Creation as He called him to
fellowship with divinity in the garden of Paradise; He thirsted for man
in Revelation, as He tried to win back man's erring heart by telling
the secrets of His love; He thirsted for man in the Incarnation when He
became like the one He loved, and was found in the form and habit of
man.
Now He was thirsting for man in Redemption, for
greater love than this no man hast, that he lay down his life for his
friends. It was the final appeal for communion before the curtain rang
down on the Great Drama of His earthly life. All the myriad loves of
parents for children, of spouse for spouse, if compacted into one great
love, would have been the smallest fraction of God's love for man in
that cry of thirst. It signified at once, not only how much He thirsted
for the little ones, for hungry hearts and empty souls, but also how
intense was His desire to satisfy our deepest longing.
Really,
there should be nothing mysterious in our thirst for God, for does not
the hart pant after the fountain, and the sunflower turn to the sun,
and the rivers run into the sea? But that He should love us,
considering our own unworthiness, and how little our love is worth-that
is the mystery! And yet such is the meaning of God's thirst for
communion with us.
He had already expressed it in the
parable of the Lost Sheep, when He said He was not satisfied with the
ninety-nine; only the lost sheep could give Him perfect joy. Now the
truth was expressed again from the Cross: Nothing could adequately
satisfy His thirst but the heart of every man, woman, and child, who
were made for Him, and therefore could never be happy until they found
their rest in Him.
The basis of this plea for communion
is Love, for Love by its very nature tends to unity. Love of citizens
one for another begets the unity of the state. Love of man and woman
begets the unity of two in one flesh. The love of God for man therefore
calls for a unity based upon the Incarnation, namely, the unity of all
men in the Body and Blood of Christ. In order, therefore, that God
might seal His love for us, He gave us to Himself in Holy Communion, so
that as He and His human nature taken from the womb of the Blessed
Mother were one in the unity of His Person, so He and we taken from the
womb of humanity might be one in the unity of the Mystical Body of
Christ. Hence, we use the word "receive" when speaking of communion
with our Lord in the Eucharist, for literally we do "receive" Divine
Life, just as really and truly as a babe receives the life of its
mother. All life is sustained by communion with a higher life. If the
plants could speak they would say to the moisture and sunlight, "Unless
you enter into communion with me, become possessed of my higher laws
and powers, you shall not have life in you."
If the
animals could speak, they would say to the plants: "Unless you enter
into communion with me, you shall not have my higher life in you." We
say to all lower creation: "Unless you enter into communion with me,
you shall not share in my human life."
Why then should
not our Lord say to us: "Unless you enter into communion with Me, you
shall not have life in you"? The lower is transformed into the higher,
plants into animals, animals into man, and man, in a more exalted way,
becomes "divinized," if I may use that expression, through and through
by the life of Christ. Communion then is first of all the receiving of
Divine Life, a life to which we are no more entitled than marble is
entitled to blooming. It is a pure gift of an all-merciful God who so
loved us that He willed to be united with us, not in the bonds of
flesh, but in the ineffable bonds of the Spirit where love knows no
satiety, but only rapture and joy.
And oh, how quickly we
should have forgotten Him could we not, like Bethlehem and Nazareth,
receive Him into our souls! Neither gifts nor portraits take the place
of the beloved one. And our Lord knew it well. We needed Him, and so He
gave us Himself. But there is another aspect of Communion of which we
but rarely think. Communion implies not only receiving Divine Life; it
means also God giving human life. All love is reciprocal. There is no
one-sided love, for love by its nature demands mutuality. God thirsts
for us, but that means that man must also thirst for God. But do we
ever think of Christ receiving Communion from us? Every time we go to
the Communion rail we say we "receive" Communion, and that is all many
of us do, just "receive Communion."
There is another
aspect of Communion than receiving Divine Life, of which St. John
speaks. St. Paul gives us the complementary truth in his Epistle to the
Corinthians. Communion is not only an incorporation to the life of
Christ; it is also an incorporation to His death. "As often as you
shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall shew the death
of the Lord, until He come." Natural life has two sides: the anabolic
and the katabolic. The supernatural also has two sides: the building up
of the Christ-pattern and the tearing down of the old Adam.
Communion
therefore implies not only a "receiving" but also a "giving." There can
be no ascent to a higher life without death to a lower one. Does not an
Easter Sunday presuppose a Good Friday? Does not all love imply mutual
self-giving which ends in self-recovery? This being so, should not the
Communion rail be a place of exchange, instead of a place of exclusive
receiving? Is all the Life to pass from Christ to us and nothing to go
back in return? Are we to drain the chalice and contribute nothing to
its filling? Are we to receive the bread without giving wheat to be
ground, to receive the wine and give no grapes to be crushed?
If
all we did during our lives was to go to Communion to receive Divine
Life, to take it away, and leave nothing behind, we would be parasites
on the Mystical Body of Christ.
The Pauline injunction
bids us fill up in our body the sufferings wanting to the Passion of
Christ. We must therefore bring a spirit of sacrifice to the
Eucharistic table; we must bring the mortification of our lower self,
the crosses patiently borne, the crucifixion of our egotisms, the death
of our concupiscence, and even the very difficulty of our coming to
Communion. Then does Communion become what it was always intended to
be, namely, a commerce between Christ and the soul, in which we give
His Death shown forth in our lives, and He gives His Life shown forth
in our adopted sonship? We give Him our time; He gives us His eternity.
We give Him our humanity; He gives us His divinity. We give Him our
nothingness; He gives us His all.
Do we really
understand the nature of love? Have we not sometimes, in great moments
of affection for a little child, said in language which might vary from
this, but which expresses the idea, "I love that child so much, I
should just like to possess it within myself?" Why? Because all love
craves for unity. In the natural order, God has given great pleasures
to the unity of the flesh. But those are nothing compared to the
pleasure of the unity of the spirit, when divinity passes out to
humanity, and humanity to divinity-when our will goes to Him, and He
comes to us, so that we cease to be men and begin to be children of
God.
If there has ever been a moment in your life when
a fine, noble affection made you feel as if you had been lifted into
the third or the seventh heaven; if there has ever been a time in your
life when a noble love of a fine human heart cast you into an ecstasy;
if there has ver been a time when you have really loved a human
heart-then, I ask you, think of what it must be to be united with the
great Heart of Love! If the human heart in all of its fine, noble,
Christian riches can so thrill, can so exalt, can make us so ecstatic,
then what must be the great heart of Christ? Oh, if the spark is so
bright, what must be the flame!
Do we fully realize how
much Communion is bound up with Sacrifice, both on the part of our Lord
and on the part of us, His poor weak creatures? The Mass makes the two
inseparable: there is no Communion without a Consecration. There is no
receiving the bread and wine we offer, until they have been
transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. Communion is the
consequence of the Calvary; namely, we live by what we slay. All nature
witnesses this truth; our bodies live by the slaying of the beasts of
the fields and the plants of the gardens. We draw life from their
crucifixion. We slay them not to destroy, but to fulfill; we immolate
them for the sake of communion.
And now by a beautiful
paradox of Divine Love, God makes His Cross the very means of our
salvation. We have slain Him; we nailed Him there; we crucified Him;
but Love in His eternal Heart willed not to be defeated. He willed to
give us the very life we slew; to give us the very Food we destroyed;
to nourish us with the very Bread we buried, and the very Blood we
poured forth. He made our very crime a happy fault; He turned a
Crucifixion into a Redemption; a Consecration into a Communion; a death
into life everlasting. And it is just that which makes man all the more
mysterious! Why man should be loved is no mystery, but why he does not
love in return is the great mystery. Why should our Lord be the Great
Unloved; why should Love not be loved? Why then, whenever He says: "I
hirst," do we give Him vinegar and gall?
