Saturday, October 08, 2005
Fount and Apex?
This is my first post on this blog. (I have another one, which I also recently created, with a different intended focus.) What follows here is a little history of my thought process about this wnderful topic.
When I was studying for a degree in Religious Education a number of years ago, I was struck by statements in various Church documents on the importance of the Eucharist in the Christian life. For example, the Dogmatic Constitution on the Church calls the Eucharist "the fount and apex of the whole Christian life." The Constitution on the Liturgy says that "the liturgy, and primarily the Eucharist" is "the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed...the fountain from which all her power flows."
I was struck by these and similar statements because they didn't ring true to my experience. In my own Christian life, which I thought was pretty vital, the Eucharist wasn't that central. Sunday Mass was important to me, and I had no problem with any doctrine about the Eucharist. I thought in fact that I had a good appreciation of the Real Presence and a real reverence for Holy Communion. But it seemed to me that these statements exalted the Eucharist too much. After all, Christ is present in the other sacraments as well, though obviously not in the same way as in the Eucharist. Moreover, since Baptism is the sacrament by which one enters the Christian life, should it not be considered "the fount"? My ecumenical sensitivities were also disturbed by the great emphasis on something that so many Christians don't share.
Through the years since I finished my degree, my understanding of the Eucharis deepened in some ways, but I still didn't see how the Eucharist could have such a central place in the Christian life. My attitude was not that the Church must be wrong, but that something was missing in my understanding of the sacrament or, I thought more likely, in my understanding of the Church documents. But then something like a revolution occured in my comprehension. The change began with the recollection of a basic catechism truth: the Mass is the representation of Christ's sacrifice on the cross! That is, the presentation again of Christ's sacrifice.
