I think one of the reasons people struggle with the idea of the Eucharist today is its simplicity. The mass has certainly undergone significant changes over the millennia. At times, it has been more elaborate and had many elements added; at other times, it has been more direct and austere. But at its heart has always been a very simple rite: sharing a meal with God himself—a basic meal that appears to be bread and wine. In our culture, and even at the time of Jesus himself, this ritual has a baffling simplicity. We want to see more because we live in a culture of spectacle.
We need more and novel entertainments. We spend our lives seeking more. Every movie and show has to push the boundaries and do something new that we have never seen before. The news must be increasingly graphic and incendiary to keep our attention 24/7. Even our vacations have become a chasing of novelty. We must find new places, see new sites, and have new experiences. We can’t get enough. And if we are not saturated with continual inflows of more and new, then we are not satisfied. But this is a delusion.
I think that if we are honest with ourselves, we all know that this is a delusion. This obsession with spectacles, while it brings a fleeting happiness, does not touch upon what we truly desire. If we would sit in silence for a moment, shut off all the noise, and think about when we were last truly happy, truly satisfied with life, we would realize it was not in any of those moments. Most likely, our last best memory was a moment with family or friends—it was a moment of sitting down and sharing a meal and conversation.
This is certainly true in my own life. I remember one year in particular: my freshman year of high school. Every Friday night, my mother would pick me up from school, and we would drive to the nearest bigger city with a good movie theater and watch the latest movie. Then we would have dinner and come back home. We did this every week. When I look back on that year, I think of it as one of the happiest in my life, even though it wasn’t a good year. It came at a difficult time of turmoil and change for my family. But it is filled with wonderful memories. I can’t tell you a single movie that we saw. I can’t tell you the names of the restaurants that we ate at. I can’t tell you any of the spectacles that we saw. All I can remember is that I was happy driving forty-five minutes back and forth and spending time with someone who loved me, and I loved in return. I don’t even remember what all we talked about. Because, ultimately, it doesn’t matter. It was spending time together that truly meant something.
Those are the best memories of my life, and others like them, because those were the moments in life that I truly found its purpose—to be loved and to love. The spectacles of life fade away. Great buildings and places, entertainment, the things we collect in this world will all disappear. They decay and are destroyed in time. We cannot take any of them with us into death. But our relationships, our communion with others—those moments of being loved and showing love—these can survive. That is the great promise that Jesus makes to us in his offer of eternal life.
That is why the Eucharist is so simple, so mundane. A simple sharing of bread and wine with God himself is meant to be a reminder of what is truly important. It is a call to let go of all that is fleeting and ephemeral in life and cling to what actually matters—relationships, communion. To build up and enjoy the one element of life that can survive death and prepare us to experience that communion forever. We speak of the Eucharist as a foretaste of heaven because it is. Heaven is the life of perpetual perfect communion with God and all those who desire it. So let us embrace the Eucharist in all its profound simplicity and the call to love one another as God has first loved us.