He Is Not a Symbol

Brother,

You have walked past Him a thousand times.

Past the red lamp burning beside the tabernacle. A genuflection, maybe — knee toward the floor, half a second, already thinking about the parking lot. And if you are like most men, you have never let the full weight of what is inside that gold box actually land on you.

This Sunday the Church makes you look at it.

The claim that emptied the room

Corpus Christi — the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ — exists for one reason: to force the Church, once a year, to stop hedging about what she actually believes.

Go back to the sixth chapter of John. Jesus tells the crowd: "My flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink." Not like food. True food. They recoil — "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" — and they walk away. Many of them. And here is the line that should stop a man cold: Jesus does not call them back. He does not say wait, it was a figure of speech. He turns to the Twelve and asks if they will leave too. He let them go rather than soften it.

A symbol does not empty a room. Only the truth does that.

What the Church has never let go of

For two thousand years she has guarded the same scandalous claim: that at the words of consecration the bread and wine become — truly, really, substantially — the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Not a sign of Him. Him. The appearances of bread and wine remain; the substance underneath does not. The Church calls it transubstantiation, and she has let her sons be killed rather than call it a metaphor.

The novelist Flannery O'Connor was once at a dinner where a fashionable guest called the Eucharist a lovely symbol. O'Connor — quiet by nature — said: "Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it." Then the only sentence that matters: "It is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable."

That is the faith handed to you. Not a symbol you admire from the pew. A Person you kneel in front of.

The father's part

A man will drive his sons to every practice, every tournament, every lesson across three counties. Corpus Christi puts a simpler, heavier question to him: are you bringing them to the one place on this earth where God is physically present?

You cannot consecrate the Host — that is the priest's. But you can be the man who kneels first. Who genuflects like he means it. Who gets the family to Sunday Mass not as a box checked but as the summit the rest of the week bends toward. Who, now and then, takes one child to sit ten silent minutes in front of the tabernacle and say nothing at all.

Your children will believe He is really there if they watch their father act like He is.

This week

One act. This Sunday, as you genuflect — or just before you receive — stop for three full seconds. Do not rush it. Look at the tabernacle and make the act of faith Thomas made: My Lord and my God.

Say it like a man who believes the God of the universe is ten feet away.

Because He is.

Altar. Arms. Allegiance.

— The Sanctum Dispatch

P.S. Reply and tell me: when did the Real Presence stop being an idea to you and become real? A funeral, an adoration chapel at 2 a.m., a priest who knelt like he believed it? I read every reply.

One last thing this week.

The daily disciplines that keep a man close to the altar — Sunday Mass kept like the summit it is, the family led to adoration, the rule a father actually keeps — are the backbone of the Catholic Man's Rule of Life: 7-Day Field Manual. It's free.

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For God.  For country.  For the fight.

In Christ and Our Lady,
Will
Founder, 1765 Sanctum Co.