There are many paths which lead to your glorious eternity, but, O my God, you have made a highway which leads there with the surest certainty. Now, my soul, this is none other than the way of the holy cross. This way is the royal highway of all the elect, for it leads to the royal city of the King of kings. It is the royal highway; for it is along this way that the great company of the saints advances, together with the Queen of saints and the great King of Paradise.

Is this a hard doctrine? At the conclusion of the Eucharistic discourse, delivered at the synagogue in Capernaum, Jesus practically lost his entire Church because his disciples said “This teaching is difficult; who can accept it?” Again, if he were speaking only at the symbolic level, why would this theology be hard to accept? No one left him when he observed that he was the vine or the good shepherd or the light of the world, for those were clearly metaphorical remarks and posed, accordingly, no great intellectual challenge.

Moreover, in his vision of apocalyptic judgment, the prophet Ezekiel speaks of the carrion birds who will swoop down on the enemies of Israel and eat their flesh and drink their blood. Finally, a popular Aramaic saying of Jesus’ time identified the devil as the “eater of flesh.” If the prohibitions we have rehearsed had to do with the consumption of the bloody flesh of animals, how much more offensive must Jesus’ words have been which encouraged the eating of his own human body. Hence the viscerally negative reaction of Jesus’ audience.

When they asked Jesus how he had gotten there ahead of them, the Lord chided them: “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill of the loaves. Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life. ”Ordinary bread satisfies only physical longing, and It does so in a transient way: one eats and one must soon eat again. But the heavenly bread, Jesus implies, satisfies the deepest longing of the heart, and does so by adapting the one who eats it to eternal life. The Church Fathers loved to ruminate on this the me of divinization through the Eucharist, the process by which the consumption of the bread of life readies one for life in the eternal dimension. In the versions of the Lord’s prayer found in the synoptic Gospels, we find the phrase ton arton...ton epiousion, usually rendered as “daily bread.”

In 1950, Flannery O’Connor was brought by friends to a dinner with the prominent author Mary McCarthy and her husband. At the time, O’Connor, who would eventually blossom into one of the greatest Catholic writers of the twentieth century, was just commencing her career, and there was no question that she was a junior member of this elite circle of conversation. In fact, in a letter describing the scene, she commented, “Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.”

The ultimate sacrifice having been offered, Christ the priest comes forth at every Mass with his lifeblood, and the universe is restored. The priest’s actions at the altar are but a symbolic manifestation of this mystical reality, which is why he is described as operating in persona Christi (in the person of Christ). And this is why, furthermore, the forgiveness of sins is so central to the Eucharistic liturgy.

But God does indeed desire something for his human creatures— namely, fullness of life—and this comes when they surrender themselves in love to him. The sacrifice of Jesus is nothing but this total self-gift to the Father that effectively straightens out the human race, and therefore God is delighted when we actively participate in it, joining our minds, wills, and bodies to it. The sacrifice of the Mass does not constitute a challenge to God; rather, it breaks, as it were, against the rock of God’s selfsufficiency and returns to us as a life-enhancing power.