This is kind of an old thread, but maybe someone out there is ‘listening’ and can give me some feedback.
I’m currently addressing this with some young people who may or may not have been taught as children, and may or may not simply accept it. I’ve been looking around online for inspiration. This is an idea I had. I wonder if anyone can tell me if it’s off-base, and why. I’m thinking of approaching this as a literature teacher (which I am).
It seems to me that nothing in ‘real life’ is like transubstantiation, so there’s not ever going to be some ‘real-life’ analogy that will ‘work’ without at the same time ‘planting wrong seeds’ in people’s minds.
This made me ask whether there’s anything in fiction that is like transubstantiation. After all, if we can have C.S. Lewis giving us a lion who is a ‘type’ of Christ, why couldn’t other fiction writers have written a story that - wittingly or not - echoes transubstantiation? Transubstantiation really happens, just as redemption through Christ’s cross really happened. It’s not far-fetched to wonder if people made up stories that reflect their belief in transubstantiation much as Lewis made up a story based on Christ’s redemptive sacrifice.
I am sitting here wondering if fairy-tales about changelings - princes who were changed into frogs, for example - might have come out of some midieval imagination that was aware of the mystery of the externals looking one way, but the ‘reality’ being something else. It looks like a frog, hops like a frog, swims like a frog, but in fact, it’s a prince. Little kids have no problem entering into such fantasies, so it’s no wonder they have no problem entering into the mystery of transubstantiation. (My convert mother told me that her belief in fairies as a child helped her convert as an adult: she simply applied the child’s easy acceptance of unseen realities.)
There was a Disney film back in the 1960s, I think, in which a mother and daughter both make a wish at the same time: the mother wishes she had the daughter’s care-free life, and the daughter wishes she had the mother’s ‘freedom’ to do what she wanted. Because spoke the wish at the same time, they changed places. The daughter looked like the daughter, but in fact, she was the mother; the mother looked like the mother, but in fact, she was the daughter.
Maybe, with very little kids, the key is not to try to find something in external reality that makes a perfect analogy (a couple thousand years of trying hasn’t produced anything yet, and most of us have a deadline). Kids don’t know much about external reality anyway. Maybe with little kids, it’s enough to say, ‘You know those stories when the prince is turned into a frog? He’s really a prince, but everyone thinks he’s a frog because he looks like a frog. Well, those stories are based on what happens at Mass. When the priest says the words God gave him, the bread and wine turn into Jesus. It only looks like bread and wine, but God has told us that it’s really Jesus. The fairy-tales didn’t really happen, but at Mass, bread and wine really do become Jesus.’
I wonder what people think about this as a way of explaining transubstantiation to little kids. (I also wonder if I just came up with a PhD topic in the field of fairytales.)
