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The Eucharist and the Hope of Conversion

with Deacon James Keating Ph.D.

An excerpt from the talk by Deacon Keating…

We know that self-involvement is boring because we know all the remedies that Americans try to unleash themselves from that boredom, sex, drugs, and rock and roll. We all know that we are bored because we are constantly anesthetizing ourselves. We are constantly escaping. We are constantly distracted as a culture because the one thing that is weighing us down is what the commercial market, governments, popular culture, everyone tells us that we should be involved in, the self. And the only one who doesn’t say we should be involved in the self is the one we crucified and killed.

That’s how powerful the movement to stay self-involved is, even under anesthesia, the anesthesia of the current culture, because God help anyone who tries to free us or release us from this powerful self-involvement, they will be killed. They will be ignored. They will be, in some way, tortured, relegated to the margins, attacked. That’s how much we love the self.

The remedy to that is Sunday mass. And of course, the reason Sunday mass is dwindling in attention, in a de-attention, and we are closing parish after parish across diocese after diocese is because the mass is the only hour not about the self. There is nothing to attract an American to the mass because its objectivity does not pander to immediate gratification. And the whole culture panderers to immediate gratification. And the one holy and sacred place that refuses to play into our wound is the mass. The one place that refuses to profit off of our wound is the mass. Can we jazz it up a bit? Can you make it more like entertainment? Can you please change the prayers every Sunday so it’s not all predictable? And the mass stands its ground of objective revelation of the one act of God, which is our only way into the freedom from the self.

This is my body given for you. Two thousand years, we are not budging on that objective reality. If you want to be relieved of the burden of the self, you must suffer the mass. It is not entertainment. It is reconfiguration of your first interest. And that is a spiritual chiropractic that hurts like hell. It is a reorientation of your first interest. And to be with God, it cannot be you. It has to be the mystery of God’s own self that fascinates us.

So He gives us baptism and He gives us all the other sacraments to assist in this reorientation. And the drama of our lives is very clear. In the end, will he or will he not become sick of himself? Let’s watch and see. And if he becomes sick of himself in the face of the revealing beauty of God and he participates in what has been revealed, the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we call that salvation, and we’ll call that man saved, holy. But it is a wrenching drama.

If you look at the next series of notes there, the Eucharist is the mutual indwelling of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In other words, the Eucharist is God pouring out his love. That’s the gift. The Eucharist is God, the Trinitarian God pouring out the gift, which is his love in order to invite us to receive it. See that passive language? In order to invite to receive. There is no coercion in love. We must trust, surrender, and respond to the grace.

Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO. 

Check out Deacon Keating’s “Discerning Heart” page

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Episode 6 -Crossing the Desert: Lent and Conversion – “The Oasis of Lent”.

Moral conversion occurs in ordinary experience when we hit a wall or break through one. In other words, moral conversion can be ignited when we reach our limits and experience failure or finitude, or it can be ushered in when we transcend our limits and go beyond the self. We transcend the self by falling in love and/ or following the prompting of conscience at the cost of our own ego.

The traditional disciplines of Lent— prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, as well as communal worship— aim at fostering or preparing a person to welcome such limiting or breakthrough experiences. Most importantly, we are prepared to receive the truths known in these experiences, since we can rarely, if ever, orchestrate them. More than likely, we are taken up into such experiences, and our preparation beforehand can enhance our acceptance of the truths they carry.

(In regards to communal worship) …We usually imagine worship as a break in our secular lives, or sometimes even an obstacle to achieving other goals. With this attitude, worship is sometimes simply seen as “time out” from what is really important. Without denying the importance of secular realities for the laity, could we look at worship in another way? Worship is not an obstacle to daily living; it is not time off from more vital realities. Worship is, in fact, the great doorway into all that is both secular and holy. It is our way into real living. In worship, we find the great integration of the simple, ordinary, and plain (people, bread, wine, words) with the holy and transcendent (paschal mystery, incarnation, grace, transformation, salvation). The call of the laity is to carry into each day of work and domestic commitment the truth that the ordinary and the holy are not opposed. Only sin and the holy are opposed. Lenten worship services help us bring this truth to the world.

The more we come to see the presence of Christ in worship as a presence that permeates our being in the world, the more we will hunger to participate in worship as the source of our moral witness in everyday life. The Eucharist primarily is our participation in Christ’s Paschal Mystery, which is his self-offering to the Father, both in his life and upon the cross, and is also the Father’s response in raising him from the dead. Christ came to us; he came to dwell upon Earth and take on created goodness so that all in creation that is not good (sin) may be transformed by his presence, by grace. We too, in communion with him through the grace of the sacramental life, fill the ordinary world with his presence and become witnesses to this salvation through virtue and grace cooperating in moral activity.

Deacon James Keating, Ph.D., is a professor of Spiritual Theology and serves as a spiritual director at Kenrick Glennon Seminary in St. Louis, MO. 

Check out Deacon Keating’s “Discerning Heart” page