To The Editors

Commonweal, May 21, 1999

Dressed for life

I always appreciate Sidney Callahan's keen common sense. In her fine reflection on the Eucharist [April 23] she writes: "What we imagine, attend to, and imitate we become." In the wake of the Littleton killings we also glimpse the demonic underside of that observation.

If eucharistic celebration lies at the heart of the "Gospel of Life," it also impels us to discern the anti-eucharistic elements that pervade much of our culture. All too often our culture imagines, attends to, and imitates death not life, as that cranky and canny Catholic, Walker Percy, warned in The Thanatos Syndrome (a warning eerily echoed in Don DeLillo's White Noise).

Thus the integral celebration of the Eucharist must, of its nature, foster countercultural attitudes and dispositions, however much we celebrants may camouflage them with clouds of incense. As Callahan ponders the appropriateness of the assembly's donning the "thanks and praise garments-much like the gowns worn by Oxford scholars to signal their role as seekers after wisdom," she might incorporate Annie Dillard's suggestion regarding the headgear most suitable for the liturgy's transformative challenge: the crash helmet!

(Rev.) Robert P. Imbelli Newton Centre, Mass.

Sense of the sacred

In my opinion, Sidney Callahan ["The Eucharist," April 23] has isolated a core crisis in North American Catholicism-the demystification of the Eucharist. The problem has been discussed at length and eloquently in past issues of Commonweal, but Callahan says it simply: The pendulum has swung too far. For many Catholics today, according to all these disturbing polls we read, the Communion event is genial and commemorative, as it is for many Protestants, but hardly an experience of the "body, blood, soul, and divinity" of Jesus himself, as our predecessors in the faith witnessed it to be. That these words embarrass us today is a sobering development, for it can persuasively be argued that much of the strength of Catholic loyalty in the past-in the face of mumbled Latin Masses and all the other issues-had to do with knowing that "Jesus is here in this church" and capable of uniquely incarnating his words from John, "I in them." These were the days when 90 percent of baptized Catholics attended Mass.

To us Commonweal Catholics, this line of talk can sound awfully like "restorationism," as Callahan implies. But we need to recall the words of Andrew Greeley from another recent issue of Commonweal [April 9], that Catholicism is a "both/and" religion. Faith in and experience of the real presence in the Eucharist does not in any inevitable way cancel our experience of each other as a sacred community, our openness to the power of Scripture, our impulse to charity and social justice, or our response to the world as a place where grace abounds. Logically, in fact, our engagement with the world stands to be strengthened by the empowering experience of Christ's presence within our very tissues. While identifying with the other "presences" of Christ just as Callahan does-congregation, Scripture, celebrant-Vatican II is at pains to privilege Christ's presence "under the species of the Eucharist." Article 7 of the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy declares the presence to abide there "most especially" (or "par excellence," as Callahan renders it)-"maxime sub speciebus eucharisticis" (emphasis added).

This would be a theological quibble if the issue of Real Presence hadn't become a central factor in contemporary Catholicism's crisis of faith. What lies behind the tidal wave of "spirituality," New Age and otherwise, is a hunger for the "sense of the sacred," that is, for contact with the mysterium tremendum that the church used to provide and that seems to have been largely expropriated by science and quantum cosmology, the angel craze, and by such Hollywood imaginings as Close Encounters and Star Wars. It's fine to quote Karl Rahner's phrase, "the world is a sacrament," for there's obviously truth in it. But that sound bite, in a world that runs on sound bites, can subtly disorient us. What need do we have then of the "sacrament" of church if it is merely more of the same, or in a word, redundant? Indeed, as Callahan found, sacramentality is often sensed everywhere except in the church. Several years ago, America asked two dozen or so practicing Roman Catholics to describe how they experienced God in their lives, and not one of them mentioned "in the sacrament of the Eucharist." This survey revealed just how radically the sense of the sacred has been expunged from our liturgical and devotional traditions. No wonder people are turning elsewhere.

The time has come for a reaffirmation of our eucharistic faith, and this includes a hard look at contemporary Catholicism's suspicion of beauty, awe, and silence (when was the last time your celebrant observed the "meditation after Communion" prescribed for liturgy?). The disastrous loss of adherents to mainline Protestantism-that is, to religion that's become mere "ethics with feeling"- should serve as a sad but clear warning.