The Purpose of the Eucharist
Just as with so many things in Catholicism we are led from the corporeal to the spiritual, from the sensible to the intelligible, from the particular to the universal. But in helping to reach these higher plains, the means to them, that is, the corporeal, the sensible, etc. are not illusions but are perfectly real.
Now Christ as a whole is present in the bread and wine, namely, body, blood, soul, and divinity. The body and blood are means to delivering the divinity. The Eucharist is a tool left by Jesus to assist the faithful in the fight against the devil. When the priest raises the host, it’s as if rays of white light stream from it. Each host (both bread and wine) after consecration contains a small piece of light of Jesus’s divinity. When the host is eaten, the bread and wine, being body and blood and soul which contain the divinity open up like petals in a flower and release the divinity that settles in the will (having been made suitable for it by Jesus’s own union of human soul and divinity), strengthening it and filling it with love for God, scaring away the devil. Or so, at least, I was made to understand in a kind of revelation.
Posted: September 6th, 2008 under Religion.