Perhaps I don’t have a full understanding of consubstantiation either. I understand it to mean that Jesus is present in the bread and the wine. Now, whether this is in a physical sense or in a spiritual sense, I’m not certain. I guess I always thought this was somewhere between it just being a symbol and being completely transformed into his body and blood. I think my biggest thing is that I’m not comfortable thinking that the bread and wine ARE the body and blood of Jesus…because what if it’s not? (not to say anything against anyone. I really want to believe that it is). I went to adoration a couple of times and couldn’t help but thinking that I was praying to an inanimate object, but then I hate to think that too because I feel like I’m rejecting God. See where I’m torn?
I think you hit on it there, it is a Mystery and we cannot explain Mysteries fully or understand them fully. The Church, in the Catechism, explains what happens, but she cannot explain how, no one can do that. But perhaps I can say a couple of things which help me.
First, Christ is not the bread and wine, He is
in the
appearances of bread and wine, because the
substances of the bread and wine have been changed into the
Substances of Christ’s body and blood. The
appearances of bread and wine are mere
accidents and accidents are not substances. For example, I am a substance and I am white. Whiteness is not me, it is a mere accident, but it exists in me. If I disappear leaving only whiteness, what is that? It is nothing. In philosophical terms, whiteness cannot exist without being in some substance, like me.
So when the Church says that Christ exists
in the accidents it means Christ is where the
accidents are, but in the sense that He is wherever His power is, not in the sense that He actually is the accident of bread or the accident of wine. He is where they are because His power is where they are. His Presence is often described as being behind the
accidents. Or we could say He fills every thing and space or contains every thing and space where He is Present. And when the accidents are dissolved He is no longer there.
Now His presence if a real physical presence. But it is a
glorified or spiritualized physicality, the kind of physicality than is compatible with His spirit. We cannot imagine that kind of physicality because we have had only one glimpse of it. After His Resurrection, Christ walked the earth for 40 days in His spiritualized physicality. During that time He demonstrated that His Glorified, physical body could appear at will wherever He willed, it could walk through solid matter like doors and walls, it could consume food and drink or not, He could and did Ascend into the Heavens. In other words, His Glorified Body and Blood was bound by no law of nature, it operated as though they did not even exist for Him.
And this is the Body and Blood we receive in Communion. And how is this possible in such a small bit of these accidents, even down to the crumb and the drop? Because His Glorified, physical Body is not bound by the laws of the natural universe. Doesn’t even science tell us that the entire universe originated in a mass as small as the head of a pen? Well then, why cannot Christ be really and truely be in a single crumb of the bread and a single drop of the wine? Doesn’t science tell us that the entire universe is basically nothing but energy. And what is that? Is it not something that is at least comparable to a spiritualized substance? At least it can give us an idea of what spiritualized physicality might be like.
And just think of it. Christ is really and truely present in every Church where a consecrated host is present. And even though you may live a mile or more away from that Church you can communicate by prayer with the real, physical Christ, as He appeared upon His Resurrection, all day long!
Linus2nd
