Corpus Christi

Homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ 2023

Wisdom speaks and says: “God has made everything appropriate to its time, but he has placed the timeless in our hearts.” (Eccl. 3:11)

There is a philosophical concept that comes out of the French School of Catholic thought and that concept is called the method of immanence. And “the method of immanence” holds that the logic of human existence itself points to the transcendent; that is our very human limitations point to limitlessness, our most basic, messy humanity points to Divinity.

Last month, this past May, I had the terrible privilege of sitting at my oldest brother’s bedside as he slowly died from a cancer he fought for over a year. And it seems to me, no matter how many times I’ve been at the bedside of someone who is dying, one thing remains true, the human body, at its utmost extremity of limitation, will fight fiercely for life. Our human flesh doesn’t need to be told to do this! That fierce fight for life is at the precious heart of each of us. It has been planted there by God. The very frailty of our human reality points unmistakeably toward what is utterly invincible. As one spiritual writer has it: “In our vulnerability, true invincibility is manifested in the world.”

This, I believe, in a fundamental way, is Corpus Christi. This is what it means “to participate in the Body of Christ.” Our own bodies, in the midst of our daily limitations, and when we are perhaps most frail, point directly to the life that does not know death. And we, as the Body of Christ, the community of believers, are only recognized as members of that same body when we fight for life, for the fullness of life for all our brothers and sisters, and not in spite of our frailties and limitations but strangely enough, because of them and through them.

One scripture scholar writes that when it is all said and done the Bible reveals that there are two basic desires that God has for each one of us: Freedom and Life. And as far as God is concerned we can never have too much of either. And that Freedom and that Life are at the very heart of who we are. Endless Freedom and Endless Life has already been planted right in the center of our human limitations. Like God providing a previously unknown food in the desert of our reality. Or like God drawing water from the flinty rock of our fragility.

The very logic of our human existence points toward the transcendent. Just as ordinary bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ and we take that Body and Blood inside ourselves. So we don’t just have life within us but life eternal. And even our greatest vulnerabilities can never overcome that life. And we are recognized as the Body of Christ exactly when, in the midst of our own personal limitations and fears, we fight fiercely for the fullness of life.

So, no matter how broken you are… you are the Body of Christ! No matter how traumatized you’ve been… you are the Body of Christ! No matter how fearful you are… you are the Body of Christ! No matter how hurt you’ve been… you are the Body of Christ! No matter how ashamed, disregarded, unseen, abandoned, forgotten you feel… you are the Body of Christ!

The very logic of our human existence in all its beauty and in all its frailty points directly toward the transcendent. In our Eucharist today let us renew our hope in this truth.

As Thomas Merton once wrote:

“The Voice of God is heard in Paradise (and God says): ‘What was fragile has become powerful. I loved what was most frail. I looked upon what was nothing. I touched what was without substance, and within what was not, I am'”