To eat and to drink are a need, but in our common experience, when fulfilled together with others, this biological need can acquire a superior valence. To sit at table with relatives and friends becomes a social rite, which, more or less formalised, strengthens the bonds of belonging, of friendship and reciprocal solidarity. To share the same meal is like sharing the life, which it nourishes. On weddings  or at supper with intimate persons, what matters is not the taking of food as a vital need, but meeting, living the pleasure of an exchange of words, gestures and cordiality of feelings.

It is the relation that matters, because man and woman, grow, become persons through the relation.

In the light of modern human sciences, human relation assumes an absolute “centrality”. Theology, anthropology, psychology, pedagogy and spirituality confront themselves with an ever more increasing conviction of this fundamental dimension of human life. Even a superficial glance at the psychiatry of our deep being is enough to prove it. All of us experience the “nourishing” value of relation and the fact that its absence means unhappiness. Is there anyone who does not know that the loss of a relation is worse than death?

Every communion founds itself on relation, on dialogue, on communication. The communion between God and His family in Christ, the Church, is like this. Therefore, the highest sign of Christian communion is the Eucharistic meal.

We have made many readings on this mystery: biblical, theological, spiritual, anthropological and historical readings. Nevertheless, there is also a liturgical reading, which is not less theological, but becomes characteristic and different from the others, because it starts from the lived experience of the Church, from its celebrated faith.

The liturgical itinerary of the celebration is the one in which the faithful has the first immediate impact.

In the Liturgical Constitution No. 48, the Council has stated that the experience of the mystery passes through the experience of the rite. In fact, the faithful should not assist as dumb spectators of the great mystery of faith, but should understand it well –through the rites and prayers- partaking in the sacred action “with awareness, fully and actively”.

This was the classic method of the fathers, and it is still our own. S. Augustine says that, it is the visible word, in which the acting of God incarnates itself. It is the whole drama of Salvation History walking towards Easter. This acting of God is the will of communicating love and salvation, and in its revelation, it demands and invokes a response.

Relation woven with dialogue

The subsidy for the liturgical formation,  in Spirit and Truth of 1992, No. 40, states, “The liturgy is a permanent dialogue between God and His people,  bound by a covenant for the salvation of man”. God convokes his people because He wants to communicate: He wants to reveal his will, to make a gift, to assign tasks. Moved by that call, we are provoked to give an answer.

God has always acted like this. His gifts are never impositions. Dialogue is an essential part of these proposals.  It continues,- “It was the same with the call of Adam and the covenant on Sinai, with the promises to David and Solomon, with the great convocation of the people by Joshua (Gen.8, 32 and following), by Ezekiel (2 Co. 20), by Josiah (2Co, 35) and Ezra (No.8). It was the same with the mysterious and unforeseeable offer to Mary of Nazareth (Luke, 26-35), the last but one act, in the waiting for the supreme, definitive one of the Cross-.

God meets his creatures or his people, observes the covenants, reminds them of the assumed commitments and, on the other side, the creatures listen, understand, answer, with praise and thanksgiving or with asking forgiveness. The liturgy lives of this movement, of this admirable exchange between God and his people.

Everything takes place along the line of the dialogical encounter.

The Eucharistic celebration and its strength of communication

The Eucharistic celebration, which actuates the Easter mystery of Christ, presents itself structurally in the dynamics of a dialogical relation alternatively declined on the theme of listening, of recognition, of acceptance, of gratitude, dedication and love. In the Eucharistic celebration, this communication opens with an introductory dialogue where, in a rich sequence of rites and words, we establish communicating concepts between God and his people.  Every single man is accepted within them, wherever he finds himself in faith, hope and charity, and is invited to partake in the experience of the encounter with God in Christ and with His body, the Church.

The Liturgical action continues with a certain listening, which becomes recognition and communication with God, who speaks through the Scriptures.

The celebration, therefore, opens in a sequence of gestures and words, which signify the welcome of a Gift-Person: God offers himself in Christ, actualising the memorial of his sacrifice. They signify also an invitation to offer oneself with Him, thanking, praising and blessing Him.

Finally, in the rites of communion, communication becomes a communitarian body, where the difference of the other persons is, in Christ, principle and reason of rich and deep communion. In this communion the invocation with Jesus to the His Father and our Father, everything is the actuation of the Gospel communion and an invitation to its existential practice. We see “a grateful procession to the banquet;   the hands of many people in the act of begging the same Bread of life; the amen which testifies in a personal way the identical faith of the Church;   the singing in unison, the silent thanksgiving.  1.

A proposal of a transforming dialogue

When we observe the Eucharistic celebration, we find that the dialogical structure appears with more evidence in the liturgy of the Word. The various components of the Assembly speak and listen in order to enter in communication, to participate vitally in whatever is said or heard, not only to express some truth 2.

In this dialogical way of communicating, listening has the first place; a listening capable of receiving the word intentionally as an asking of opinion. The true listening knows how to create a space for the word in its fecundating potentiality3. In fact, there is no better listener than the one who knows how to turn into a womb,  into a vital space for the strength of the word.

In the dynamics of communication, the true listening is not only a listening aiming at welcoming the message and allowing oneself to undergo transformation. It is also a listening conditioned by time. As an act, which shoulders a questioning word, it cannot shorten, economise or annul the time; it cannot “make a question of time”4. It can stop, it can “lose” time, it can stay actively in the dialogical dynamics of communicating through and to the word.5.

This dialectic is true of every communication, but it is more so in the communication of the Word of God. The communion in Christ and His sacramental and ecclesial body, starts, first of all, from the communion of his word.

The listening to his word does not consist so much in receiving contents, as rather in recognising the Author hidden in those contents.

Thus, we understand the proclamation even when at the end the reader concludes, “The Word of God”, though at the beginning the reader declared that it was the content of a letter of Paul, or of Peter, or of John. It is word, which has become “presence of God”, just because it is in act within a liturgical action. “At the basis of this there is the fact that, in the proclamation, I do not read something, but there is someone who speaks to me. The writing is no longer one word, no longer one logos, but dia-logos”6.

It is just in this dialogue that the recognition of the other takes place. It is the recognition of God who speaks to the single person and to the community, waiting for an answer.

Nevertheless, communion with the Word is also communion of faith. It is also communitarian experience, because it is a believing listening within a community action.

There is someone,(the reader) who speaks “on behalf of” and there is the one who listens to him, yet, all those who hear are “under the same word”7. He who proclaims, (he himself is a listener), he who presides and the people who are present, all are living parts of a body, the assembly. Those who listen and those who proclaim act in communion with the others, to communicate the same faith to the same salvation history, which God shares with his people.

I think that it is decisive to underline  this communion of listening and announcement, which makes visible the unity of faith, constitutes and founds the unity of the body, as much as the communion with the broken Bread and the shed Blood of the Eucharistic celebration in a strict sense.

To communicate the Word is, without fail, a communitarian experience, above all when it is liturgical. This stimulates the growth of the single person in the understanding of the Word and in its historical actuation, to be of benefit for the ecclesial and civil community. St. Gregory the Great writes, “Many things in the Scriptures, which I could not understand alone, I understood when I was among my brothers”8. The act of finding ourselves faithful around the celebrated Word, helps us to interpret all together, more efficaciously, the history and the most critical knots of the times we live in. It helps us also to understand the lived experience of the individual and the community, consequently, to find more adequate forms of evangelisation, supported by te concrete sharing and active solidarity.

“Action of self-offering and “word” to welcome

The recognition of God, through the welcoming of his Word, provokes gratitude and self-offering. The Eucharistic liturgy is just in the line of offering-thanksgiving to God on behalf of the community, which welcomes and thanks him through Christ. 9

On the other hand, we can read the whole salvation history in this line of dialogical recognition on behalf of the humanity of Christ and of the gratitude of humanity itself through Jesus. This is the dialogical dynamics of the covenant, which becomes communion in the Eucharist 10. The word and action of self-offering are equally present in the liturgy of the word and of the Eucharist, but in different accents.11. There, the word is bound to the action, to the act of proclamation, here it is the action that become announcement. The action of offering the food is the “word” (message) we welcome, “This is my body given … Eat it … “(Luke 22, 19).

God’s communication is, simultaneously, his self-revelation through his Word, and the act of his self-giving in food and drink in his body and in his blood.

Called to surrender ourselves as food

God’s self-offering does not wait for a return-gift. He breaks our economic schemes of “do ut des”. He lets himself be eaten and consumed. His logic is the breaking of all the economic and market logics. We can understand it only in the line of excess, of paradox and folly12.

Somebody affirms that the gift excludes the contra-gift 13. In the cold dynamics of reward, surely, yes. The communicating of God is not finalised to receive anything in return. It is gratuitous, without pre-comprehension.

Nevertheless, the communion with the donated body and the shed blood, inserts us into the same current of oblation, urges a response and calls for the participation in His destiny.

The logic and operative consequence are simple and disarming. If to communicate means to partake in the same destiny, we need to be broken like him, to give ourselves as food like him.

The Pauline exhortation of the letter to the Romans (12, 1) of offering oneself in a living sacrifice, as a repetition of the Eucharistic memorial, “Do this in memory of me”, invites us to become Eucharist to God, like him.  “He offered himself to God in a sacrifice of  sweet odour; you, too, offer yourselves in a living sacrifice pleasing to God! Jesus himself exhorts us to do like this (…); in fact, he did not mean: do exactly the gestures I have done, (…), but intended to say also: do the substance of what I have done; you, too, offer your body in sacrifice, as you see that I have done! (…). Allow me to offer to the Father my own body, which you are: do not forbid me to offer myself to the Father; I cannot offer myself totally to the Father until there is a single member of my body that refuses to offer itself with me! Therefore, do make them what is missing in my offering” 14.

“To break” oneself according to the will of the Father, as Jesus did, means also “to give ourselves as food”, to make ourselves fathers and mothers who nourish the mind, the heart, the faith, the need of justice, the need of sense, the need of education which man looks for.  “Give them yourself food to eat” (Matthew 14, 15), Jesus tells the apostles, who want to send away hurriedly the hungry crowd 15. By asking us to participate in the mystery of the Eucharist, Jesus invites us to offer ourselves without any reservation. Without any limit, putting everything in common, even if only five loaves of bread and two fish (Matthew 14,18).

This availability can be lived, also simply, as a returning of ourselves to God in a free obedience of faith; a returning it to Him, whom we recognise as Lord, before the constant suggestion of feeling and believing ourselves to be the proud and desperate centre of everything. To offer oneself in this way is not in the line of a contra-gift, which dilutes the gratuity of the gift, but in that of love which is surprised to exist, like the righteous in the judgement, according to Matthew, who re not even aware of having done any good thing (Matthew 25, 39).

Transformed by the communication itself with his body

To communicate with his body and blood means to build one body.”        (1Co 10,16-17).

It is not by chance that the Fathers of the Church have called “body of Christ” both the Eucharist and the Church: to eat the body of Christ is nothing but becoming the body of Christ 16.

Quoting St. Paul and the liturgy of Holy Thursday, Vatican II also recollects the Eucharistic memorial of the origin, that generated and expressed the Church, “Every time      (1 Co 5,7), …. (1 Co 10, 17)”17.

The ecclesial communion, born from the Eucharist is, therefore, still a gift, a proposal. It does not produce itself, does not generate itself, but we receive it. It is not the fruit of man’s researches, but the free and gratuitous offering of an undeserved and undeserving gift. It is the gratuitous participation in the mystery of the death and resurrection of the Lord that gives it, through the invitation (it is still a proposal) of eating from the same banquet, and drinking from the same cup. No human expedient could ever generate such an intimate and real relation as this, no collective exaltation, even if provoked by perfect pedagogical strategies, will ever be able to realise the unity of the members of Christ.

A real transformation of the ecclesial body will take place only through the gift of communion with his sacramental body. It is a communion, which provokes the true communion in the charity of Christ, in the Holy Spirit. “Grant the fullness of the Holy Spirit to us, who nourish ourselves with the body and blood of your Son, so that we may become in Christ one body and one spirit (and this “becoming” is charged with the transforming force of the epiclesis)” 18.

Going once again along the dynamics of a relation, which aims at creating a mature and maturing communion between God and his people, we have drawn in filigree a formation project founded on the central sacrament of our celebrated faith.

The Eucharist –which has been read again here in its proper dynamics of action made up of words, things and intentional gestures conveying messages and moving towards the participation in a constant vital inter exchange- has appeared as a place par excellence, which unifies the person and projects it in its maturing and happy self-gift.

The dialogue born from listening and in possession of a proclaimed word, or even said in the action of giving oneself as food, arouses an involving response, which transforms because of the action of the Spirit.  It transforms us into his body, the Church.