In a moment of climactic despair, the hero of Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise spreads his arms to the sky and cries, “I know myself, but that is all!”
Our culture and our country have taken up the same complaint; though we psychologize and analyze ourselves more than any age in history, I think each of us eventually realizes on our own terms that self-knowledge isn’t enough to ensure happiness. In always setting ourselves in front of ourselves as an object, we’ve actually lost our sense of self and our sense of real presence. As an antidote to this crisis, Catholicism offers the answer it’s been offering for 2,000 years: the Eucharist.
If the problems here (detachment and self-loss) don’t seem to match the proposed solution (a sacrament you may not believe in), that’s all right. But think about it this way: Catholics believe that during Mass, the bread and wine become the actual Body and Blood of Christ. He’s not just there in your imagination—He’s as truly present as the person in the pew next to you. It’s a miracle that helps to heal a situation like this one:
A young woman, for example, goes to college. She makes some friends, goes out on Fridays, joins two or three clubs, stays active, has good career prospects, and maybe hooks up occasionally, though without being plagued by guilt. She’s been taught to identify what she wants in life and go after it confidently; still, there are nights or slow afternoons when she does get the sense (sometimes viscerally) that there’s a problem at the center of her life she doesn’t know how to solve. Even though she knows what to say during interviews and dates, even though she knows her Myers-Briggs type and Love Languages, she doesn’t actually know what’s inside herself and may admit, if she’s honest, that she’s afraid to find out.
There must be something in her that defies categorization, but for all our culture’s attempts to help her identify her traits, it’s failed to help her identify what a self is in the first place. And so the moments come when she feels somehow detached even from herself—a horrible and unnatural experience.
If you’ve seen a monstrance before (as the picture with this article shows) you’ll recognize that all the gold, all the decoration, circles around the Host at the center. Our culture often teaches us to build up decoration, to surround ourselves with attributes, experiences, accomplishments, wants, memories, images, and complexities. Accomplishing this, we set on the altar in front of us an empty monstrance, where we can see our faces reflected weakly in the glass, but where there is no host inside. There is no real presence. We’ve missed the whole point without knowing how.
At the center of a hurricane of desires—whether physical, psychological, or spiritual—we find the same thing we always find at the center of a hurricane: an empty eye. It doesn’t matter whether we search for ourselves in academics, leadership roles, sex, careers, sports, or art. All of that storm, that racket, will ultimately spin around a vacant space.
And that is one of many reasons why we so badly need the Real Presence itself, the Eucharist. Christ is more present under the appearance of that bread than you often are to yourself, living in your own body. We need that reality now more than ever; we need the monstrance to be filled so we can be filled, too, and so we can know that full and beautiful existence is possible. We need His self, which is not an imaginary self contingent on outward appearances, but one without grey areas. We need to be able to look at, touch, and even consume the most real thing in the world.
Tolkien wrote of the Eucharist, “Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. …There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth.”
Put the Blessed Sacrament before yourself—literally and metaphorically—and you’ll find that none of us are vacant spaces when we understand ourselves in relation to Christ’s Presence. At the heart of our being is something incredibly valuable, but we’ll never find it if we settle for the parts of ourselves that we can describe in words.
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