In the 1973 horror classic, “The Exorcist,”
one scene shows the protagonist,
Fr. Damien Karras presiding at Mass.
At the moment that he says the Prayer of Consecration–
“This is my body”–we hear the thoughts
racing through his head:
“It’s just bread… It’s just bread…”
Indeed the consecrated host looks nothing like Jesus.
There is nothing about it that indicates
that the Lord is actually present in the Eucharist.
Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist
is a hidden presence–but no less real
just as God is really present in the world–
even in the most ordinary and mundane–
in a hidden way.
The first big message of Holy Thursday is:
“Look for the God hidden in things.”
Don’t take reality at face value;
don’t limit your search to the surface
because the Lord will not be found there.
As the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, put it
in his poem, “God’s Grandeur”:
“There lives the dearest freshness deep down things.”
Through the Incarnation,
God gathered His infinite vastness
to enter into our space and our time.
In Jesus, God became material,
blessing matter with His Divine Presence–
and matter was never the same again.
To find the divine,
we need to look attentively.
image from fogsmoviereviews.com, soul-candy.info