Eucharistic Spirituality-4

Eucharist as a Sacrament of Transformation and Healing

Theodore E.Dobson:

The Eucharist is, at its roots, a sacrament of transformation. The rite itself is speaking the language of renewal and transformation.

The Lord’s supper is the ultimate rite of ‘humanization”, that is, of becoming the best that a human being can be physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

(As Eucharist is a sacrifice, our participation it makes us sacrificial).To sacrifice …means to make something sacred by giving it to God, in such a way that it changes, and at least feels as if it were being destroyed. We are given the opportunity to make this kind of sacrifice in the Eucharist with all the parts of our human selves—to make them sacred by giving them to God so freely that we feel as if they were being destroyed.

( Here we try to find how our participation in different parts of the mass can be opportunities of transformation as well as healing for us).

To praise God…means that we focus on Him with our entire selves—body, mind and spirit. When we come together for worship, we are often caught up in the concerns of our own lives—our problems, our pains and illnesses, and our hurt feelings. Immediately, God begins to change us through praise. He draws us out of ourselves and out of our selfish concern to enjoy the wonder of Him…In praise we begin the work of self-sacrifice by giving to God concerns that keep our vision narrow and our faith weak.(P.25)

The Eucharist is God’s sign of His unconditional affection for us. It is the celebration of His victory over all that is destructive in this world. As such, it confronts all that would destroy or mutilate our human natures. Through the Eucharist, our isolationism, privatism, fear of people who are different from ourselves, and the loneliness that comes from all of these are themselves destroyed, for they bring psychological and spiritual death.(p.37)

The heart of the mystery of the Eucharist is this: as the bread and wine are transformed and made sacred, so are we transformed and made sacred, if we unite ourselves consciously and prayerfully with these symbols of sacrifice.

When we sacrifice we are giving away something that belongs to us without expecting anything in return. A sacrifice comes from a deeper love and commitment, and it expresses the true intentions of the heart.(p.45)

But even if after we give our gift to God, it is not a sacrifice if we are expecting something in return. Many times we sacrifice to God thinking we are buying His love or forgiveness for our sin.

Celebrating the Eucharist means being poor. It means giving our lives as a gift and not receiving anything back but a relationship. It means allowing the participation mystique to be broken, so that we see ourselves as we are…

The Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper encourages us into this kind of spiritual poverty through continuous sacrifice of our selfishness….making a sacrifice of ourselves, then, implies considerable self-knowledge. We have to find and own the entirety of ourselves…even those parts of ourselves of which we are unconscious…

At each Eucharist, Jesus calls us to celebrate with Him…he asks us to become conscious of various parts of ourselves we have not yet given to the Father, and to sacrifice them to Him.(p.51)

On Easter morning all that had looked and felt like suffering, death, hopelessnes, and despair was revealed as joy, life, hope, and the continuing promise of renewal.In every Eucharistic celebration, Jesus offers the same opportunity for transformation and renewal to us in every part of our lives that we choose to sacrifice with Him to our Father.

Our sacrifice becomes real because we are giving what means most to us—control over our own lives. When we sacrifice these parts of us, they are released from the darkness of our unconscious and they become conscious(p53).

To prepare ourselves for the Eucharist, then, we need to become aware of some element of our lives which we will sacrifice to God—some talent, quality, spiritual gift, relationship, weakness, illness, goal… and we give one part of ourselves to God each time we come to Him. Often the sacrifice we make to God on a particular day is determined by the most important goal we have at that time, or by the most pressing problem. Whatever it is,we bring it to God for transformation,healing,and renewal.

If we are going to celebrate the Eucharist for self-sacrifice,then, we will do best by determining a particular element of our lives we are going to give to God in each celebration. This part of our lives can be our personal theme for the Eucharist, and prayerfully we bring this part of ourselves to God each portion of it.(p.65)

We unite the physical aspects of our life-situation(our labor and the money we earn from it) with the bread, and the emotional and spiritual aspects(our attachment to our work,our feelings , the money earned from it etc.)with the wine.The bread and wine become vehicles for our sacrifice…Now our labor and its fruits are transformed and spiritualsed into something greater than they ever were before are joined with His sacrifice...(p.69)

Eucharist can be our healing service too…We need to sacrifice our weaknesses to God. When we speak of our weaknesses and illnesses we mean things like our darker emotions,our neediness, our painful memories, our emotional and spiritual confusion, our sinfulness, our broken relationships, our physical pain and diseases and all the parts of our personalities that we reject… He loves our weaknesses more, simply because they need His love more.(p.77)

God loves our weaknesses and He desires that His love will bring them into wholeness(healing).However, He wants and needs our trust to do it,and that is the great gift we give Him when we sacrifice our weaknesses to Him.When we sacrifice our weaknesses to God, we are trusting His love….When we give God our attachments to our weaknesses, then, we are giving Him the great gift of freedom to make of our lives whatever He wants them to be.Therefore,essentially when we give God our weaknesses we are giving Him the same gift as when we give Him our strengths,namely ,openeness to growth,maturity and grace. (We bring this weakness as our personal theme.p.82)

If we are praying for people with whom we are not in good relationship, the Eucharist can be a powerful prayer of forgiveness…The Eucharist becomes a means of putting aside our conditions for accepting them and simply receiving them into our hearts, appreciating them the way they are…

Through the Eucharist we can pray that God bless them and make them happy in the way that would please them the most, whether or not they ever make us happy.

An Outline of Participation:

1.Become quiet within, and center on the power of Jesus in your life.

2.Decide on your personal theme for the Eucharist

3.Bring to mind all the aspects of this issue that you can think of, both physical and interior

4.Prayefully and intentionally , unite the physical aspects of this issue with the bread

5.Unite the psychological and spiritual aspects with the wine

6.Be aware of how much your gift means to you and give it to God precisely because it means so much to you.

7.At the Words of consecration, believe that what you have prayerfully united with the bread and wine enters into the heart of Jesus

8.Continue to give control of this issue to Jesus,so that His love can permeate it and transform it

9.During the Our Father, sacrifice your ego as you allow His values preeminence in your life

10.At the communion, believe that Jesus can bring the renewal you need, physically and emotionally.

11. As you pray after communion, ask God to reveal to you what he is doing for the renewal of your personal theme so that you can cooperate with Him as He does it.

12.At the dismissal, thank God for what he has done

13.Gratefully receive His commission to give Eucharistic love to others(p.127)