The president is appearing on television. If a child should say, “Mom, the president is on TV!” what woman in all the world would answer, “Oh, that’s not the president, it’s just some electromagnetic waves exciting phosphors on a piece of glass”?
How fantastically greater is the reality. The president is actually appearing on millions of TVs — even on tiny, hand-held, TV of a man walking on the street — in color, action, speech, and influence.
How can that be? It is because we live amid an invisible ocean of radio, television, radar, and other electromagnetic waves. With that in mind, who dares say that mere bread and wine remained when Jesus said, “This is my body . . . This is my blood” at the Last Supper and conferred the power of confecting the Eucharist on his disciples? What greater arrogance could there be than to say to the Lord of creation, “I do not believe you”? Think about how easily we accept the merely natural mysteries of the consecrated bread and wine.
Astronomer Lloyd Motz of Columbia University has written, “If the total energy contained in [any] gram of matter were released, it would be sufficient to lift a one-million-ton object six miles into the air” (Science Digest, February 1981). A gram is only 1/28 ounce. If the energy hidden in the bread and wine used at Mass were suddenly set free, everything around it would be blown to dust, so unimaginable is the atomic power God has hidden in these outwardly unimpressive substances.
Do the bread and wine being prepared before the consecration — and we ourselves — appear solid and substantial? Really, the bread and wine and we are ghosts, specks of cosmic dust given size and form only by nuclear, electromagnetic, and gravitational forces. We are 999 trillion quadrillionths empty space: ”If you enlarge the nucleus [of an atom] until it is the size of a bowling ball, this atom would be twenty miles across with the electrons, pea-sized in scale, scattered around the [atomic] sphere” (Smithsonian, May 1982).
The bread and wine used to confect the Eucharist lie on the altar so still and motionless . . . but are they? Their electrons are whirling around their atomic nuclei trillions of times a second (1014 revolutions per second), their atoms restlessly elbow one another, their molecules dance to the melodies and discords of such forces as light and heat.
Do the altar bread and wine influence us? In more ways than one. It is a fundamental law of physics that every object in the universe reaches out in gravitational attraction to every other object. This means that while all other objects reach out toward the bread and wine, they in turn reach out in endless gravitational bonds with their influence. The poet Francis Thompson put it beautifully:
“All things near and far
subtly connected are:
thou canst not disturb a leaf
without diverting a star.”
Do you feel a warm atomic glow when you receive the Eucharist? Maybe not, but the radioactivity is there in the accidents of bread and wine. As they grew, the wheat and the grapes incorporated so much radioactive carbon-14 into their cells that, if the bread and wine initially made from them were found intact two thousand years from now, scientists could tell with startling accuracy by their remaining radioactivity when they had come into existence.
Are the man-made bread and wine ordinary things? What’s ordinary about, say, the water content of the wine? Water tempers the world’s weather by its resistance to temperature changes, forms into clouds or explodes into steam, expands as it freezes to insulate lakes and seas, wets as water and cuts as ice, is the most universal solvent, is almost incompressible, pulls itself up against gravity by capillary action, supports weight by surface tension, in clouds floats in the air by the millions of tons, washes away mountains, is essential to life, and glorifies God by rainbows and snowflakes. “Ordinary”? Such things are breathtaking examples of the marvels already imparted by their Eucharistic Architect in the materials prepared for consecration: chosen additionally by his wisdom to symbolize by bread all man’s labors and by wine his celebrations.
As the story goes, a guard at the Louvre Museum in Paris overheard a groom say to his bride as they left the exhibit, “I really didn’t think much of it.” The guard stepped up and said, “Young man, this place is not on trial. You are.”
I mentioned just a few of the many mysteries lying in the bread and wine readied for the Eucharist. Setting aside the profound mysteries in human perception — the why and how of atomic forces, the mystery of life in grapes and wheat struggling upward in a universe otherwise running down, the incomprehensible nature of time affecting all things — there is perhaps the greatest natural mystery of all: that when we eat ordinary bread and wine they begin to live and laugh and love.
In the face of such a swarm of merely natural mysteries, the Creator of these wonders steps into our world. While on earth he showed his power over physical substance by changing water into wine at Cana (John 2:1-11) and by twice multiplying loaves and fishes (Matt. 14:14-21 and 15:32-39). First in his own person and then through the lips of those he empowered as his successors, he assures us that he has displaced all such hidden mysteries with his glorified body by the words of consecration: “This is my body. . . . This is my blood. . . . Do this!” Can we doubt?
Indeed, the Eucharist is not on trial. We are.