At Easter Vigil 2015 I will enter full communion with the Catholic Church, which I hope will be a touchstone for greater depths in my spiritual journey toward God. In this series, I attempt to share ‘why’, not as defense or argument, but to point at something better for the mystical body of Christ. It is organized over five themes during Passion Week: merger, reclamation, hunger, visibility and unity.
I remember distinctly the moment I believed in ‘sacramental grace.’ It was the spring 2014 undergraduate class in Christian history I mentioned in yesterday’s post, where I encountered these words of Irenaeus: “For as the bread of the earth, receiving the invocation of God, is no longer common bread but Eucharist, consisting of two things, an earthly and a heavenly; so also our bodies, partaking of the Eucharist, are no longer corruptible, having the hope of eternal resurrection.” Also Ignatius, “They [the Docetics] abstain from the Eucharist and prayer because they do not admit that the Eucharist is the flesh of our savior Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, which the Father in his goodness raised up.” Communion with the early church provoked in me a hunger for the Eucharist – not a remembrance whose only power is in the recollection of an event, but whose power resides in the Holy Spirit making real and substantive the Christ crucified for me by the will of the Father.
The common table is for those who share common belief, who have unity of mind. Only the baptized may take Communion, or Eucharist, as has been the Christian practice for millennia. I could not partake at the Eucharist table, however, with those whom I shared this common understanding; I would first have to enter full communion with the Catholic Church. I joyfully enter this full communion on Saturday. The hunger I have for the body of Christ will soon be sated – but I do hunger for even more. (more…)
Warrior Poet 